The Physical Universal Shifts of Consciousness

Jane Roberts' Seth Material

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Jane Roberts

This information called "Seth Material" started coming to us in 60's from Jane Roberts and her husband, who both were living in USA. Jane Roberts and her husband published 10 books of the material given by the entity called Seth and which was channeled through Jane (according to Jane, Seth seems to be a part of her Higher Self). This info changed the mentality of many people over the years and influenced a lot of writers. You can find a lot of wisdom in her books if you throw away all religious, metaphisical and New Age stuff. I find it very useful these days. There are some valuable thoughts in these passages, which you can find on: http://www.alienshift.com/id134.html

Seth: You Form Your Own Reality
Seth, from Seth Speaks (Jane Roberts)

A. According to Seth we create our own reality--literally--through beliefs we hold. This life is only one of many that we live in a variety of times and places. The experiences--both pleasant and distressful--which we encounter are no more real than a dream and appear within our lives as educational devices to demonstrate the consequences of our actions. Because the essence of the universe is love, we are safe and taken care of now and through eternity. We have on-going access to information about the nature of reality and our personal lives, but we must use our conscious minds to evaluate this information and to make decisions. Finally and perhaps most important, there is no authority superior to each person's essential self; Seth's words are merely an attempt to present us with knowledge that we ignore when it comes from our own inner beings.

B. We are multidimensional beings who inhabit many realms and who exist throughout eternity; developing continually into more creative and fulfilled individuals.

C. The universe is of good intent; evil and destruction do not exist except as a scenario. Evidence of evil in the world appears to our senses in order to let us know the consequences of the beliefs we hold, but mankind will awaken from that sadness as from a bad dream.

D. By acknowledging and, whenever possible, following our impulses, we can discover the purpose of our lives and learn how to act in such
a way as to benefit both ourselves and the world.

E. There is no authority superior to the guidance of a person's inner self. Seth's words are merely an attempt to present us with the knowledge that we ignore when it comes to our psyches. The entity is the basic self, immortal, nonphysical and the individual is the portion of the whole self that you manage to express physically. Desire, wish, and expectation rule all actions and are the basis for all realities. You create your own reality, there are no exceptions!

Seth: "You create your reality according to your beliefs and expectations, therefore you should examine these carefully. If you do not like some aspect of your world, then examine your own expectations."
"Realize that your physical experience and environment is the materialization of your beliefs. If you find great exuberance, health, effective work, abundance, smiles on the faces of those who you meet, then take it for granted that your beliefs are beneficial.
If you see a world that is good, people like you, take it for granted again, that your beliefs are beneficial. But if you find poor health, a lack of meaningful work, a lack of abundance, a world of sorrow and evil, then assume your beliefs are faulty and begin examining them."

"Your world is formed in faithful replica of your own thoughts...If you think positive suggestions to yourself about a situation you send telepathic ammunition for positive... You must learn to erase a negative thought or picture by replacing it with its opposite."

"You form your own reality. But in forming that reality, you change other realities of which you do not know. The joy, the challenge, the
responsibility, the creativity is yours. There is no other message that I can ever give you, or that you can give yourself. You are, each of you, All-That-Is experienced through your own individuality, and the transubstantiation of your flesh."

"You should tell yourself frequently 'I will only react to constructive suggestions.' This gives you positive ammunition against your own negative thoughts and those of others."

"A negative thought, if not erased, will almost certainly result in a negative condition. Say to yourself, 'That is in the past. Now in this new moment, this new present, I am already beginning to change for the better.'"

"It does not do to repress negative thoughts, such as fears, angers, or resentment. They should be recognized, faced and replaced.
Recognize resentment when it is felt, and then realize that resentment can be dismissed. Initial recognition must be made. Then you must imagine removing the resentment 'by its roots' and replacing it with a positive feeling."

"You must watch the pictures that you paint with your imagination. Your environment and the conditions of your life at any given time are the direct result of your own inner expectations. If you imagine dire circumstances, ill health or desperate loneliness, these will be "automatically" materialized, for these thoughts themselves bring about the conditions that will give them a reality in physical terms. If you would have good health then you must imagine this as vividly as you fearfully imagine ill health."

"You create your own difficulties. This is true for each individual. The inner psychological state is projected outward, gaining physical reality -whatever the psychological state may be....You cannot escape your own attitudes, for they will form the nature of what you see. If changes are to occur, they must be mental and psychic changes. These will be reflected in your environment. Negative, distrustful, fearful, or degrading attitudes toward anyone work against the self."

"Using your free will, you have made physical reality into something quite different than what was intended. You have allowed the ego to become overly developed and specialized. You were here to work out problems and challenges, but you were always to be aware of your own inner reality, and of your nonphysical existence. To a large extent you have lost contact with this. You have focused so strongly upon
physical reality that it become the only reality that you know."

During one ESP Class session, there was a discussion of "possible use of animals to predict earthquakes, and whether people should feel they need to run away from earthquakes".

Seth: "The animals leave! That sounds like good sense to me. Think about it!... Amid the mad scramble, you DO make your own reality. I admit that sounds too simple, but you will not be caught in an earthquake if you do not want to be, and no one dies who has not decided to do so. You make your own reality, or you do not. And if you do not, then you are everywhere a victim, and the universe must be an accidental mechanism appearing with no reason. So that the miraculous picture you have seen of your body came accidentally into creation, and out of some cosmic accident attained its miraculous complexity. And that body was formed so beautifully for no reason except to be a victim. That is the only other alternative to forming your own reality. You cannot have a universe in between. You have a universe formed WITH a reason, or a universe formed WITHOUT a reason. And in a universe of reason, there are no victims. Everything has a reason or nothing has a reason. So, choose your side!"

Seth: Challenges set up in our past lives as you know yourselves; you only accept those suggestions, ideas, and
hang-ups that suit your purposes at this time. You are not, therefore, at the mercy of any neurosis from a past life, nor are there any fears from your present lives you cannot conquer. I have not said that you will necessarily conquer them, but it is within your ability to do so. The decision is your own according to your understanding. You cannot
be hounded from one level of reality to another by a fear that you do not understand. You cannot be threatened in this life by fears from your early childhood, or by so-called past existences, unless you so thoroughly believe in the nature of fear that you allow yourselves to be conquered by it. Each of your personalities are free to accept and develop, from the miraculous banks of reality, those experiences and emotions that you want, and to reject those you do not want. Let me give you an example that each of you can use in your own way. Suppose the worst, that in this life you have the following background:
You are poor, you are of a minority race, you are not intellectual, you are a woman, you have a severe physical defect and you are no beauty. Now you set these challenges for yourself in a so-called past life. This does not mean that you cannot use all of your courage and resolution to solve these problems. You set them in the hope that you WILL solve
them. You did not set them like millstones about your neck, hoping ahead of time that you would drown. All you have to do is realize your own freedom. You form the reality that you know, not esoterically, not symbolically, and not
philosophically. Some great over soul doesn't form it for you- you cannot put the burden there, either. You have in the past, collectively and individually, blamed a god or a fate for the nature of your personal realities- those aspects, indeed that you did not like. The personality is given the greatest gift of all; you get exactly what you want to get. You create from nothing the experience that is your own. If you do not like your experience, then look within yourself and change it. But realize also that you are responsible for your joys and triumphs, and that the energy to create any of these realities comes from the inner self. What you do with it is up to the individual personality."

Seth TES quote

"There must be an open-minded, ad openhearted attitude here. You must not try to use what you have learned in a narrow, limiting way. This
hampers your own development. It closes your eyes to many possibilities that will be important to you. It is natural, perhaps, to want to use what you have learned, this information, as a technique to achieve what you at any particular time think desirable, a particular person, a particular thing. But what is important is the inner development. If this is taken care of, it will automatically lead you to the person that is best for you and to the circumstances that will help you develop. To insist that a specific individual or a specific goal be attained through these methods is limiting. There must always be the acknowledgement that you do not consciously as yet realize the depths of yourself, the goals you have set and the challenges, and this material should be used to open up your inner horizons and to lead you in those directions toward which your inner self has already set you. If you then egotistically, say - No - this particular situation is what I want, then you may be blocking the inner direction which has been meant for you."

~ Seth (Jane Roberts) from The Early Sessions, Book 8

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Seth Speaks

FROM: http://sethspeaks.org/

CHAPTER 1

I DO NOT HAVE A PHYSICAL BODY, YET I AM WRITING THIS BOOK

You have heard of ghost hunters. I can quite literally be called a ghost writer, though I do not approve of the term "ghost." It is true that I am usually not seen in physical terms. I do not like the word "spirit," either; and yet if your definition of that word implies the idea of a personality without a physical body, then I would have to agree that the description fits me.

I address an unseen audience. However, I know that my readers exist, and therefore I shall ask each of them, now, to grant me the same Privilege.

I write this book through the auspices of a woman of whom I have become quite fond. To others it seems strange that I address her as "Ruburt," and "him," but the fact is that I have known her in other times and places, by other names. She has been both a man and a woman, and the entire identity who has lived these separate lives can be designated by the name of Ruburt.

Names are not important, however. My name is Seth. Names are simply designations, symbols; and yet since you must use them, I shall also. I write this book with the cooperation of Ruburt, who speaks the words for me. In this life Ruburt is called Jane, and her husband, Robert Butts, takes down the words that Jane speaks. I call him Joseph.

My readers may suppose that they are physical creatures, bound within physical bodies, imprisoned within bone, flesh, and skin. If you believe that your existence is dependent upon this corporeal image, then you feel in danger of extinction, for no physical form lasts, and no body, however beautiful in youth, retains the same vigor and enchantment in old age. If you identify with your own youth, or beauty, or intel-lect, or accomplishments, then there is the constant gnawing knowledge that these attributes can and will vanish.

I am writing this book to assure you that this is not the case. Basically you are no more of a physical being than I am, and I have donned and discarded more bodies than I care to tell. Personalities who do not exist do not write books. I am quite independent of a physical image, and so are you.

Consciousness creates form. It is not the other way around. All personalities are not physical. It is only because you are so busily concerned with daily matters that you do not realize that there is a portion of you who knows that its own powers are far superior to those shown by the ordinary self.

You have each lived other existences, and that knowledge is within you though you are not consciously aware of it. I hope that this book will serve to release the deeply intuitive self within each of my readers, and to bring to the foreground of consciousness whatever particular insights will serve you most.

As I begin this book it is late January, in your time, 1970. Ruburt is a slim, dark-haired, quick woman now, who sits in a rocker and speaks these words for me.

My consciousness is fairly well focused within Ruburt's body. It is a cold night. This is our first experience in writing a complete book in trance, and Ruburt was somewhat nervous before the session began. It is not just a simple matter of having this woman speak for me. There are many manipulations necessary, and psychological adjustments. We have established what I refer to as a psychological bridge between us - that is, between Ruburt and myself.

I do not speak through Ruburt as one might through a telephone. Instead there is a psychological extension, a projection of characteristics on both of our parts, and this I use for our communications. Later I will explain how this psychological framework is created and maintained, for it is like a road that must be kept clear of debris. You would be much better off in reading this book if you asked yourself who you are, rather than asked who I am, for you cannot understand what I am unless you understand the nature of personality and the characteristics of consciousness.

If you believe firmly that your consciousness is locked up somewhere inside your skull and is powerless to escape it, if you feel that your consciousness ends at the boundary of your body, then you sell yourself short, and you will think that I am a delusion. I am no more a delusion than you are, and that may be a loaded sentence.

I can say this to each of my readers honestly: I am older than you are, at least in terms of age as you think of it.

If a writer can qualify as any kind of authority on the basis of age, therefore, then I should get a medal. I am an energy personality essence, no longer focused in physical matter. As such, I am aware of some truths that many of you seem to have forgotten.

I hope to remind you of these. I do not speak so much to the part of you that you think of as yourself as to that part of you that you do not know, that you have to some extent denied and to some extent forgotten. That part of you reads this book, [even] as "you" read it.

I speak to those who believe in a god, and those who do not, to those who believe that science will find all answers as to the nature of reality, and to those who do not. I hope to give you clues that will enable you to study the nature of reality for yourself as you have never studied it before.

There are several things that I shall ask you to understand. You are not stuck in time like a fly in a closed bottle, whose wings are therefore useless. You cannot trust your physical senses to give you a true picture of reality. They are lovely liars, with such a fantastic tale to tell that you believe it without question. You are sometimes wiser, more creative, and far more knowledgeable when you are dreaming than when you are awake.

These statements may seem highly dubious to you now, but when we are finished I hope that you will see that they are plain statements of fact.

What I will tell you has been told before throughout the centuries, and given again when it was forgotten. I hope to clarify many points that have been distorted through the years. And I offer my original interpretation of others, for no knowledge exists in a vacuum, and all information must be interpreted and colored by the personality who holds it and passes it on. Therefore I describe reality as I know it, and my experience in many layers and dimensions.

This is not to say that other realities do not exist. I have been conscious before your earth was formed. To write this book - and in most of my communications with Ruburt - I adopt from my own bank of past personalities those characteristics that seem appropriate. There are many of us, personalities like myself, unfocused in physical matter or time. Our existence seems strange to you only because you do not realize the true potentials of personality, and you are hypnotized by your own limited concepts.

I am primarily a teacher, but I have not been a man of letters per se. I am primarily a personality with a message: You create the world that you know. You have been given perhaps the most awesome gift of all: the ability to project your thoughts outward into physical form.

The gift brings a responsibility, and many of you are tempted to congratulate yourselves on the successes of your lives, and blame God, fate, and society for your failures. In like manner, mankind has a tendency to project his own guilt and his own errors upon a father-god image, who it seems must grow weary of so many complaints.

The fact is that each of you create your own physical reality; and en masse, you create both the glories and the terrors that exist within your earthly experience. Until you realize that you are the creators, you will refuse to accept this responsibility. Nor can you blame a devil for the world's misfortunes. You have grown sophisticated enough to realize that the Devil is a projection of your own psyche, but you have not grown wise enough to learn how to use your creativity constructively.

Most of my readers are familiar with the term, "muscle bound." As a species you have grown "ego bound" instead, held in a spiritual rigidity, with the intuitive portions of the self either denied or distorted beyond any recognition.

The hour is growing late. Both of my friends must get up early in the morning. Ruburt is working on two books of his own and must get his sleep. Before I end this session I ask you to imagine our setting, for Ruburt has told me that a writer must be careful to set the scene.

I speak through Ruburt twice a week, on Mondays and Wednesdays, in this same large room. The lights are always lit. This evening it is enjoyable for me to look out through Ruburt's eyes at the wintry corner beyond.

Physical reality has always been refreshing to me, and through Ruburt's cooperation and as I write this book, I see that I was correct in appreciating its unique charms. There is one other character to be mentioned here: Willy, the cat, a beloved monster who is now sleeping.

The nature of animal consciousness in itself is a highly interesting subject, and one that we will later consider. The cat is aware of my presence, and has on several occasions reacted rather noticeably to it. In this book I hope to show the constant interactions that occur between all units of consciousness, the communication that leaps beyond the barriers of species; and in some of these discussions, we will use Willy as a case in point.

Since we have mentioned animals, let me say here that they do possess a kind of consciousness that does not allow them as many freedoms as your own. Yet at the same time, they are not hampered in its use by certain characteristics that often impede the practical potential of human consciousness.

Consciousness is a way of perceiving the various dimensions of reality. Consciousness as you know it is highly specialized. The physical senses allow you to perceive the three-dimensional world, and yet by their very nature they can inhibit the perception of other equally valid dimensions. Most of you identify with your daily physically oriented self. You would not think of identifying with one portion of your body and ignoring all other parts, and yet you are doing the same thing when you imagine that the egotistical self carries the burden of your identity.

I am telling you that you are not a cosmic bag of bones and flesh, thrown together through some mixture of chemicals and elements. I am telling you that your consciousness is not some fiery product, formed merely accidentally through the interworkings of chemical components. You are not a forsaken offshoot of physical matter, nor is your consciousness meant to vanish like a puff of smoke. Instead, you form the physical body that you know at a deeply unconscious level with great discrimination, miraculous clarity, and intimate unconscious knowledge of each minute cell that composes it. This is not meant symbolically.

Now because your conscious mind, as you think of it, is not aware of these activities, you do not identify with this inner portion of yourselves. You prefer to identify with the part of you who watches television or cooks or works - the part you think knows what it is doing. But this seemingly unconscious portion of yourself is far more knowledgeable, and upon its smooth functioning your entire physical existence depends.

This portion is conscious, aware, alert. It is you, so focused in physical reality, who do not listen to its voice, who do not understand that it is the great psychological strength from which your physically oriented self springs.

I call this seemingly unconscious the "inner ego," for it directs inner activities. It correlates information that is perceived not through the physical senses, but through other inner channels. It is the inner perceiver of reality that exists beyond the three-dimensional. It carries within it the memory of each of your past existences. It looks into subjective dimensions that are literally infinite, and from these subjective dimensions all objective realities flow.

All necessary information is given to you through these inner channels, and unbelievable inner activities take place before you can so much as lift a finger, flicker an eyelid, or read this sentence upon the page. This portion of your identity is quite natively clairvoyant and telepathic, so that you are warned of disasters before they occur, whether or not you consciously accept the message, and all communication takes place long before a word is spoken.

The "outer ego" and the inner ego operate together, the one to enable you to manipulate in the world that you know, the other to bring you those delicate inner perceptions without which physical existence could not be maintained.

There is however a portion of you, the deeper identity who forms both the inner ego and the outer ego, who decided that you would be a physical being in this place and in this time. This is the core of your identity, the psychic seed from which you sprang, the multidimensional personality of which you are part.

For those of you who wonder where I place the subconscious, as psychologists think of it, you can imagine it as a meeting place, so to speak, between the outer and inner egos. You must understand that there are no real divisions to the self, however, so we speak of various portions only to make the basic idea clear.

Since we are addressing individuals who do identify with the "normally conscious self," I bring such matters up in this first chapter because I will be using the terms later in the book, and because I want to state the fact of multidimensional personality as soon as possible.

You cannot understand yourselves, and you cannot accept my independent existence, until you rid yourself of the notion that personality is a "here and now" attribute of consciousness. Now some of the things that I may say about physical reality in this book may startle you, but remember that I am viewing it from an entirely different standpoint.

You are presently focused entirely within it, wondering perhaps what else if anything there may be outside. I am outside, returning momentarily to a dimension that I know and loved. I am not in your terms a resident, however. While I have a psychic "passport," there are still some problems of translation, inconveniences of entry that I must contend with.

Many people, I hear, have lived for years within New York City and never taken a tour through the Empire State Building, while many foreigners are well acquainted with it. And so while you have a physical address, I may still be able to point out some very strange and miraculous psychic and psychological structures within your own system of reality that you have ignored.

I hope, quite frankly, to do far more than this. I hope to take you on a tour through the levels of reality that are available to you, and to guide you on a journey through the dimensions of your own psychological structure - to open up whole areas of your own consciousness of which you have been relatively unaware. I hope, therefore, not only to explain the multidimensional aspects of personality, but to give each reader some glimpse of that greater identity that is his own.

The self that you know is but one fragment of your entire identity. These fragment selves are not strung together, however, like beads of a string. They are more like the various skins of an onion, or segments of an orange, all connected through the one vitality and growing out into various realities while springing from the same source.

I am not comparing personality to an orange or an onion, but I want to emphasize that as these things grow from within outward, so does each fragment of the entire self. You observe the outside aspect of objects. Your physical senses permit you to perceive the exterior forms to which you then react, but your physical senses to some extent force you to perceive reality in this manner, and the inside vitality within matter and form is not so apparent.

I can tell you, for example, that there is consciousness even within a nail, but few of my readers will take me seriously enough to stop in midsentence, and say good morning or good afternoon to the nearest nail they can find, stuck in a piece of wood.

Nevertheless, the atoms and molecules within the nail do possess their own kind of consciousness. The atoms and molecules that make up the pages of this book are also, within their own level, aware. Nothing exists - neither rock, mineral, plant, animal, or air - that is not filled with consciousness of its own kind. So you stand amid a constant vital commotion, a gestalt of aware energy, and you are yourselves physically composed of conscious cells that carry within themselves the realization of their own identity, that cooperate willingly to form the corporeal structure that is your physical body.

I am saying, of course, that there is no such thing as dead matter. There is no object that was not formed by consciousness, and each consciousness, regardless of its degree, rejoices in sensation and creativity. You cannot understand what you are unless you understand such matters.

For convenience's sake, you close out the multitudinous inner communications that leap between the tiniest parts of your flesh, yet even as physical creatures, you are to some extent a portion of other consciousnesses. There are no limitations to the self. There are no limitations to its potentials. You can adopt artificial limitations through your own ignorance, however. You can identify, for example, with your outer ego alone, and cut yourself off from abilities that are a part of you. You can deny, but you cannot change, the facts. The personality is multidimensional, even though many people hide their heads, figuratively speaking, in the sand of three-dimensional existence and pretend there is nothing more.

I do not mean to underestimate the outer ego. You have simply overestimated it. Nor has its true nature been recognized.

We will have more to say concerning this point, but for now it is enough to realize that your sense of identity and continuity is not dependent upon the ego.

Now at times I will be using the term "camouflage," referring to the physical world to which the outer ego relates, for physical form is one of the camouflages that reality adopts. The camouflage is real, and yet there is a much greater reality within it - the vitality that gave it form. Your physical senses then allow you to perceive this camouflage, for they are attuned to it in a highly specialized manner. But to sense the reality within the form requires a different sort of attention, and more delicate manipulations than the physical senses provide.

The ego is a jealous god, and it wants its interests served. It does not want to admit the reality of any dimensions except those within which it feels comfortable and can understand. It was meant to be an aid but it has been allowed to become a tyrant. Even so, it is much more resilient and eager to learn than is generally supposed. It is not natively as rigid as it seems. Its curiosity can be of great value.

If you have a limited conception of the nature of reality, then your ego will do its best to keep you in the small enclosed area of your accepted reality. If, on the other hand, your intuitions and creative instincts are allowed freedom, then they communicate some knowledge of greater dimensions to this most physically oriented portion of your personality.

The fact of this book is proof that the ego does not have the whole kettle of personality to itself, for there is no doubt that it is being produced by some other personality than that of the writer known as Jane Roberts. Since that Jane Roberts has no abilities that are not inherent in the species as a whole, then at the very least it must be admitted that human personality has many more attributes than those usually ascribed to it. I hope to explain what these abilities are, and point out the ways that each individual can use to release these potentials.

Personality is a gestalt of ever-changing perception. It is the part of the identity which perceives. I do not force my perceptions upon the woman through whom I speak, nor is her consciousness blotted out during our communications. Instead there is an expansion of her consciousness and a projection of energy that is directed away from three-dimensional reality.

This concentration away from the physical system may make it appear as if her consciousness is blotted out. Instead, more is added to it. Now from my own field of reality I focus my attention toward the woman, but the words that she speaks - these words upon the pages - are not initially verbal at all.

In the first place, language as you know it is a slow affair: letter by letter strung out to make a word, and words to make a sentence, the result of a linear thought pattern. Language, as you know it, is partially and grammatically the end product of your physical time sequences. You can only focus upon so many things at one time, and your language structure is not given to the communication of intricate, simultaneous experience.

I am aware of a different kind of experience, not linear, and can focus upon and react to an infinite variety of simultaneous events. Ruburt could not express them, and so they must be leveled out into linear expression if they are to be communicated. This ability to perceive and react to unlimited simultaneous events is a basic characteristic of each whole self or entity. Therefore, I do not claim it as some feat that is exclusively my own.

Each reader, being presently ensconced within a physical form, I presume, knows only a small portion of himself - as I mentioned earlier. The entity is the overall identity of which his personality is one manifestation - an independent and eternally valid portion. In these communications, therefore, Ruburt's consciousness expands, and yet focuses in a different dimension, a dimension between his reality and mine, a field relatively free of distraction. Here I impress certain concepts upon him, with his permission and assent. They are not neutral, in that all knowledge or information bears the stamp of the personality who holds it or passes it on.

Ruburt makes his verbal knowledge available for our use, and quite automatically the two of us together cause the various words that will be spoken. Distractions can occur, as any information can be distorted. We are used to working together now, however, and the distortions are very few.

Some of my energy is also projected through Ruburt, and his energy and mine both activate his physical form during our sessions, and now as I speak these sentences. There are many other ramifications that I will discuss later.

I am not, therefore, a product of Ruburt's subconscious, any more than he is a product of my subconscious mind. Nor am I a secondary personality, cleverly trying to undermine a precarious ego. I have seen to it in fact that all portions of Ruburt's personality are benefited, and their integrity maintained and honored.

There is within his personality a rather unique facility that makes our communications possible. I will try to put this as simply as possible: There is within his psyche what amounts to a transparent dimensional warp that serves almost like an open window through which other realities can be perceived, a multidimensional opening that has to some extent escaped being clouded over by the shade of physical focus.

The physical senses usually blind you to these open channels, for they perceive reality only in their own image. To some extent, then, I enter your reality through a psychological warp in your space and time. In a manner of speaking, such an open channel serves much as a pathway between Ruburt's personality and my own, so that communication is possible between. Such psychological and psychic warps between dimensions of existence are not infrequent. They are merely recognized as such infrequently and utilized even less so.

I will try to give you some idea of my own nonphysical existence. Let it serve to remind you that your own basic identity is as nonphysical as my own.

CHAPTER 2

MY PRESENT ENVIRONMENT, WORK, AND ACTIVITIES

While my environment differs in rather important respects from that of my readers, I can assure you, with ironic understatement, that it is as vivid, varied, and vital as physical existence. It is more pleasurable - though my ideas of pleasure have changed some since I was a physical being - being more rewarding and offering far greater opportunities for creative achievement.

My present existence is the most challenging one that I have known, and I have known many, both physical and nonphysical. There is not just one dimension in which nonphysical consciousness resides, any more than there is only one country on your planet or planet within your solar system.

My environment, now, is not the one in which you will find yourself immediately after death. I cannot help speaking humorously, but you must die many times before you enter this particular plane of existence. (Birth is much more of a shock than death. Sometimes when you die you do not realize it, but birth almost always implies a sharp and sudden recognition. So there is no need to fear death. And I, who have died more times than I care to tell, write this book to tell you so.)

My work in this environment provides far more challenge than any of you know, and it also necessitates the manipulation of creative materials that are nearly beyond your present comprehension. I will say more of this shortly. First of all, you must understand that no objective reality exists but that which is created by consciousness. Consciousness always creates form, and not the other way around. So my environment is a reality of existence created by myself and others like me, and it represents the manifestation of our development.

We do not use permanent structures. There is not a city or a town, for example, in which I dwell. I do not mean to imply that we are off in empty space. For one thing we do not think of space as you do, and we form whatever particular images we want to surround us.

They are created by our mental patterns, [just] as your own physical reality is created in perfect replica of your inner desires and thoughts. You think that objects exist independently of you, not realizing that they are instead the manifestations of your own psychological and psychic selves. We realize that we form our own reality, and therefore we do so with considerable joy and creative abandon. In my environment you would be highly disoriented, for it would seem to you as if it lacked coherency.

We are aware of the inner laws that govern all "materializations," however. I can have it night or day, in your terms, as I prefer - or any period, say, of your history. These changing forms would in no way bother my associates, for they would take them as immediate clues as to my mood, feelings, and ideas.

Permanency and stability basically have nothing to do with form, but with the integration of pleasure, purpose, accomplishment, and identity. I "travel" to many other levels of existence in order to fulfill my duties, which are primarily those of a teacher and educator, and I use whatever aids and techniques serve me best within those systems.

In other words, I may teach the same lesson in many different ways, according to the abilities and assumptions that are inherent in any given system in which I must operate. I use one portion of myself from many personalities that are available to my identity in these communications, and in this book. In other systems of reality, this particular Seth personality that I, the larger Seth identity adopt here, would not be under stood.

All systems of reality are not physically oriented, you see, and some are entirely unacquainted with physical form. Nor is sex, as you understand it, natural to them. Therefore I would not communicate as a male personality who has lived many physical existences, though this is a legitimate and valid portion of my identity.

In my home environment I assume whatever shape I please, and it may vary, and does, with the nature of my thoughts. You, however, form your own physical image at an unconscious level in more or less the same manner, but with some important differences. You usually do not realize that your physical body is created by you at each moment as a direct result of your inner conception of what you are, or that it changes in important chemical and electromagnetic ways with the ever-moving pace of your own thought.

Having long ago recognized the dependence of form upon consciousness, we have simply been able to change our forms entirely so that they more faithfully follow each nuance of our inner experience.

This ability to change form is an inherent characteristic of any consciousness. Only the degree of proficiency and actualization varies. You can see this in your own system, in a slowed down version, when you observe the changing forms taken by living matter through its "evolutionary" history.

Now, we can also take several forms at one time, so to speak, but you can also do this although you do not generally realize it. Your physical form can lie sleeping and inert upon the bed while your consciousness travels in a dream form to places quite distant. Simultaneously you may create a "thought form" of yourself, identical in every respect, and this may appear in the room of a friend quite without your conscious awareness. So consciousness is not limited as to the forms it can create at any given time.

Practically speaking, we are rather more advanced along these lines than you, and when we create such forms we do so with complete awareness. I share my field of existence with others who have more or less the same challenges to meet, the same overall pattern of development. Some I have known and others I have not. We communicate telepathically, but then again, telepathy is the basis for your languages, without which their symbolism would be meaningless.

Because we do communicate in this manner, this does not necessarily mean that we use mental words, for we do not. We communicate instead through what I can only call thermal and electromagnetic images that are capable of supporting much more meaning in one "sequence." The intensity of the communication is dependent upon the emotional intensity behind it, although the phrase "emotional intensity" may be misleading.

We do feel an equivalent of what you call emotions, though these are not the love or hate or anger that you know. Your feelings can best be described as the three-dimensional materializations of far greater psychological events and experiences that are related to the "inner senses."

I will explain these inner senses to you later, at the end of this chapter. Suffice it here to say that we have strong emotional experience, although it differs in a large measure from your own. It is far less limited and far more expansive in that we are also aware and responsive to the emotional "climate" as a whole. We are much freer to feel and experience, because we are not so afraid of being swept away by feeling.

Our identities do not feel threatened, for example, by the strong emotions of another. We are able to travel through emotions in a way that is not now natural to you, and to translate them into other facets of creativity than those with which you are familiar. We do not feel the need to conceal emotions, for we know it is basically impossible and undesirable. Within your system they can appear troublesome because you have not yet learned how to use them. We are only now learning their full potential, and the powers of creativity with which they are connected.

Since we realize that our identity is not dependent upon form, therefore, of course, we do not fear changing it, knowing that we can adopt any form we desire.

We do not know death in your terms. Our existence takes us into many other environments, and we blend into these. We follow what rules of form exist within these environments. All of us here are teachers, and we therefore adapt our methods, also, so that they will make sense to personalities with varying ideas of reality.

Consciousness is not dependent upon form, as I have said, and yet it always seeks to create form. We do not exist in any time framework as you know it. Minutes, hours, or years have lost both their meaning and their fascination. We are quite aware of the time situations within other systems, however, and we must take them into account in our communications. Otherwise what we say would not be understood.

There are no real barriers to separate the systems of which I speak. The only separation is brought about by the varying abilities of personalities to perceive and manipulate. You exist in the midst of many other systems of reality, for example, but you do not perceive them. And even when some event intrudes from these systems into your own threedimensional existence, you are not able to interpret it, for it is distorted by the very fact of entry.

I told you that we do not experience your time sequence. We travel through various intensities. Our work, development, and experience all takes place within what I term the "moment point." Here, within the moment point, the smallest thought is brought to fruition, the slightest possibility explored, the probabilities thoroughly examined, the least or the most forceful feeling entertained. It is difficult to explain this clearly, and yet the moment point is the framework within which we have our psychological experience. Within it, simultaneous actions follow "freely" through associative patterns. For example, pretend that I think of you, Joseph. In so doing I immediately experience - and fully - your past, present, and future (in your terms), and all of those strong or determining emotions and motivations that have ruled you. I can travel through those experiences with you, if I choose. We can follow a consciousness through all of its forms, for example, and in your terms, within the flicker of an eye.

Now it takes study, development, and experience before an identity can learn to hold its own stability in the face of such constant stimuli; and many of us have gotten lost, even forgetting who we were until we once more awakened to ourselves. Much of this is quite automatic to us now. In the infinite varieties of consciousness, we are still aware of a small percentage of the entire banks of personalities that exist. For our "vacations" we visit amid quite simple life forms, and blend with them.

To this extent we indulge in relaxation and sleep, for we can spend a century as a tree or as an uncomplicated life form in another reality. We delight our consciousness with the enjoyment of simple existence. We may create, you see, the forest in which we grow. Usually however we are highly active, our full energies focused in our work and in new challenges.

We can form from ourselves, from our own psychological entireties, other personalities whenever we wish. These, however, must then develop according to their own merit, using the creative abilities inherent in them. They are free to go their own way. We do not do this lightly, however.

Each reader is a portion of his or her own entity, and is developing toward the same kind of existence that I know. In childhood and in the dream state, each personality is aware to some extent of the true freedom that belongs to its own inner consciousness. These abilities of which I speak, therefore, are inherent characteristics of consciousness as a whole and of each personality.

My environment, as I told you, changes constantly, but then, so does your own. You rationalize away quite legitimate intuitive perception at such times. For example, if a room suddenly appears small and cramped to you, you take it for granted that this change of dimension is imaginative, and that the room has not changed regardless of your feelings.

The fact is that the room under such conditions will have changed quite definitely, and in very major respects, even though the physical dimensions will still measure the same. The entire psychological impact of the room will have altered. Its effect will be felt by others beside yourself. It will attract certain kinds of events rather than others, and it will alter your own psychological structure and hormonal output. You will react to the altered state of the room even in quite physical ways, though its width or length, in inches or feet, may not seem to vary.

I told our good friend Joseph to underline the word "seem" because your instruments would show no physical alteration - since the instruments within such a room would themselves have already altered to the same degree.

You are constantly changing the form, the shape, the contour, and the meaning of your physical body and most intimate environment, although you do your best to ignore these constant alterations. On the other hand, we allow them full rein, knowing that we are motivated by an inner stability that can well afford spontaneity and creation, and realizing that spiritual and psychological identity are dependent upon creative change.

Our environment therefore is composed of exquisite imbalances, where change is allowed full play. Your own time structure misleads you into your ideas of the relative permanency of physical matter, and you close your eyes to the constant alterations within it. Your physical senses confine you as best they can to the perception of a highly formalized reality. Only through the use of the intuitions and in sleep and dream states, as a rule, can you perceive the joyfully changing nature of your own, and any, consciousness.

One of my duties is to enlighten you on such matters. We must use concepts that are at least fairly familiar to you. In doing so, we therefore use portions of our own personalities, with whom you can to some extent relate.

There is no end to our environment. In your terms there would be no lack of space or time in which to operate. Now this would put tremendous pressure on any consciousness without proper background and development. We do not have one simple, cozy universe in which to hide. We are still alert to other quite alien systems of reality that flash on the very outskirts of consciousness as we know it. There are far more various kinds of consciousness than there are physical forms, each with its own patterns of perception, dwelling within its own camouflage system. Yet all of these have inner knowledge of the reality that exists within all camouflage and that composes any reality, by whatever name it is called.

Now, many of these freedoms are quite natural to you in the dream state, and you form dream environments often to exercise such potentials. Later I will have at least some remarks to make concerning the ways that you can learn to recognize your own feats, to compare them with your proficiency in daily physical life.

You can learn to change your physical environment, therefore, by learning to change and manipulate your dream environment. You can also suggest specific dreams in which a desired change is seen, and under certain conditions these will then appear in your physical reality. Now often you do this without realizing it.

Whole consciousness adopts various forms. It need not always be within a form. All forms are not physical ones. Some personalities, therefore, have never been physical. They have evolved along different lines, and their psychological structures would be alien to your own.

To some extent I also travel through such environments. Consciousness must show itself, however. It cannot unbe. It is not physical, it must therefore show its activation in other ways. In some systems for example, it forms highly integrated mathematical and musical patterns that are themselves stimuli for other universal systems. I am not very well acquainted with these, however, and cannot speak of them with any great familiarity.

If my environment is not a permanently structured one, then as I have told you, neither is your own. If I am aware of communicating now through Ruburt, in different ways each of you telepathically communicates to and through other personalities, though with little knowledge of your accomplishment.

The senses that you use, in a very real manner, create the environment that you perceive. Your physical senses necessitate the perception of a three-dimensional reality. Consciousness is equipped with inner perceptors, however. These are inherent within all consciousness, regardless of its development. These perceptors operate quite inde-pendently from those that might be assumed when a given consciousness adopts a specialized form, such as a physical body, in order to operate in a particular system.

Each reader, therefore, had inner senses, and to some extent uses them constantly, though he is not aware of doing so at an egotistical level. Now, we use the inner senses quite freely and consciously. If you were to do so, then you would perceive the same kind of environment in which I have my existence. You would see an uncamouflaged situation, in which events and form were free and not stuck in a jellylike mold of time. You could see, for example, your present living room not only as a conglomeration of permanent-appearing furniture, but switch your focus and see the immense and constant dance of molecules and other particles that compose the various objects.

You could see a phosphorescentlike glow, the aura of electromagnetic "structures" that compose the molecules themselves. You could, if you wished, condense your consciousness until it was small enough to travel through a single molecule, and from the molecule's own world look out and survey the universe of the room and the gigantic galaxy of interrelated, ever-moving starlike shapes. Now all of these possibilities represent a legitimate reality. Yours is no more legitimate than any other, but it is the only one that you perceive.

Using the inner senses, we become conscious creators, cocreators. But you are unconscious cocreators whether you know it or not. If our environment seems unstructured to you, it is only because you do not understand the true nature of order, which has nothing to do with permanent form, but only appears to have form from your perspective.

There is no four o'clock in the afternoon or nine o'clock in the evening in my environment. By this I mean that I am not restricted to a time sequence. There is nothing preventing me from experiencing such sequences if I choose. We experience time, or what you would call its equivalent nature, in terms of intensities of experience - a psychological time with its own peaks and valleys.

This is somewhat similar to your own emotional feelings when time seems speeded up or slowed down, but it is vastly different in important ways. Our psychological time could be compared in terms of environment to the walls of a room, but in our case the walls would be constantly changing in color, size, height, depth and width.

Our psychological structures are different, practically speaking, in that we consciously utilize a multidimensional psychological reality that you inherently possess, but are unfamiliar with at an egotistical level. It is natural, then, that our environment would have multidimensional qualities that the physical senses would never perceive.

Now, I project a portion of my reality as I dictate this book to an undifferentiated level between systems that is relatively clear of camouflage. It is an inactive area, comparatively speaking. If you were thinking in terms of physical reality, then this area could be likened to one immediately above the atmosphere of your earth. However I am speaking of psychological and psychic atmospheres, and this area is sufficiently distant from Ruburt's physically oriented self so that the communications can be relatively understood.

It is also in a way distant from my own environment, for in my own environment I would have some difficulties in relating information in physically oriented terms. You must understand that by distance I do not refer to space.

Creation and perception are far more intimately connected than any of your scientists realize.

It is quite true that your physical senses create the reality that they perceive. A tree is something far different to a microbe, a bird, an insect, and a man who stands beneath it. I am not saying that the tree only appears to be different. It is different. You perceive its reality through one set of highly specialized senses. This does not mean that its reality exists in that form in any more basic way than it exists in the form perceived by the microbe, insect, or bird. You cannot perceive the quite valid reality of that tree in any context but your own. This applies to anything within the physical system that you know.

It is not that physical reality is false. It is that the physical picture is simply one of an infinite number of ways of perceiving the various guises through which consciousness expresses itself. The physical senses force you to translate experience into physical perceptions. The inner senses open your range of perception, allow you to interpret experience in a far freer manner and to create new forms and new channels through which you, or any consciousness, can know itself.

Consciousness is, among other things, a spontaneous exercise in creativity. You are learning now, in a three-dimensional context, the ways in which your emotional and psychic existence can create varieties of physical form. You manipulate within the psychic environment, and these manipulations are then automatically impressed upon the physical mold. Now our environment is in itself creative in a different manner than yours. Your environment is creative in that trees bear fruit, that there is a self-sustaining principle, that the earth feeds its own, for example. The naturally creative aspects are the materializations of the deepest psychic, spiritual, and physical inclinations of the species, set up in your terms eons ago, and a part of the racial bank of psychic knowledge.

We endow the elements of our environment with an even greater creativity that is difficult to explain. We do not have flowers that grow, for example. But the intensity, the condensed psychic strength of our psychological natures forms new dimensions of activity. If you paint a picture within three-dimensional existence, then the painting must be on a flat surface, merely hinting at the complete three-dimensional experience that you cannot insert into it. In our environment, however, we could actually create whatever dimensional effects we desired. All of these abilities are not ours alone. They are your heritage. As you will see later in this book, you exercise your own inner senses, and multidimensional abilities, more frequently than it might seem, in other states of consciousness than the normal, waking one.

Since my own environment does not have easily defined physical elements, you will be able to understand its nature by inference, as I explain some related topics throughout this book.

Your own physical environment appears as it does to you because of your own psychological structure. If you gained your sense of personal continuity through associative processes primarily, rather than as a result of the familiarity of self moving through time, then you would experience physical reality in an entirely different fashion. Objects from past and present could be perceived at once, their presence justified through associative connections. Say that your father throughout his lifetime has eight favorite chairs. If your perceptive mechanisms were primarily set up as a result of intuitive association rather than time sequence, then you would perceive all of these chairs at one time; or seeing one, you would be aware of the others. So environment is not a separate thing in itself, but the result of perceptive patterns, and these are determined by psychological structure.

So if you want to know what my environment is like, you will have to understand what I am. In order to explain, I shall have to speak about the nature of consciousness in general. In doing so I shall end up telling you much about yourself. The inner portions of your identity are already aware of much that I will tell you. Part of my purpose is to acquaint your egotistical self with knowledge that is already known to a larger portion of your own consciousness, that you have long ignored.

You look out into the physical universe, and interpret reality according to the information received from your "outer senses." I will stand, figuratively speaking, in physical reality and look inward for you, and describe those realities of consciousness and experience that you are presently too fascinated to see. For you are fascinated with physical reality, and you are in as deep a trance now as the woman is through whom I write this book.

All of your attention is focused in a highly specialized way upon one shining, bright point that you call reality. There are other realities all about you, but you ignore their existence, and you blot out all stimuli that come from them. There is a reason for such a trance, as you will discover, but little by little you must wake up. My purpose is to open your inner eyes.

My environment includes, of course, those other personalities with whom I come in contact. Communication, perception, and environment can hardly be separated. Therefore the kind of communication that is carried on by myself and my associates is extremely important in any discussion of our environment.

In the following chapter I hope to give you an idea, quite simply, of our existence, the work in which we are involved, the dimension in which we exist, the purposes that we hold dear; and most of all, of those concerns that make up our experience.

CHAPTER 3

MY WORK AND THOSE DIMENSIONS OF REALITY INTO WHICH IT TAKES ME

Now I have friends even as you do, though my friends may be of longer standing. You must understand that we experience our own reality in quite a different manner than you do. We are aware of what you would call our past selves, those personalities we have adopted in various other existences.

Because we use telepathy we can hide little from each other, even if we wished to. This, I am sure, seems an invasion of privacy to you, and yet I assure you that even now none of your thoughts are hidden, but are known quite clearly to your family and friends - and I may add, unfortunately, to those you consider enemies as well. You are simply not aware of this fact.

This does not mean that each of us is like an open book to the other. Quite the contrary. There is such a thing as mental etiquette, mental manners. We are much more aware of our own thoughts than you are. We realize our freedom to choose our thoughts, and we choose them with some discrimination and finesse.

The power of our thoughts has been made clear to us, through trial and error in other existences. We have discovered that no one can escape the vast creativity of the mental image, or of emotion. This does not mean that we are not spontaneous, or that we must deliberate between one thought or another, in anxious concern that one might be negative or destructive. That, in your terms, is behind us.

Our psychological structure does mean that we can communicate in far more various forms than those with which you are familiar, however. Pretend, for example, that you meet a childhood friend whom you have long forgotten. Now you may have little in common. Yet you may have a fine afternoon's discussion centered about old teachers and classmates, and establish a certain rapport.

So, when I "meet" another, I may be able to relate to him much better on the basis of a particular past life experience, even though in my "now" we have little in common. We may have known each other, for example, as entirely different people in the fourteenth century, and we may communicate very nicely by discussing those experiences, much as you and your hypothetical childhood friend established rapport by remembering your past.

We will be quite aware that we are ourselves, however - the multidimensional personalities who shared a more or less common environment at one level of our existence. As you will see, this analogy is a rather simple one that will do only for now, because past, present, and future do not really exist in those terms.

Our experience, however, does not include the time divisions with which you are familiar. We have far more friends and associates than you do, simply because we are aware of varying connections in what we call for now "past" incarnations.

We have of course therefore more knowledge at our fingertips, so to speak. There is no period of time, in your terms, that you can mention, but some of us have been from there, and carry within our memories the indelible experience that was gained in that particular context.

We do not feel the need to hide our emotions or thoughts from others, because all of us by now well recognize the cooperative nature of all consciousness and reality, and our part in it. We are highly motivated. Could spirits be anything else?

Simply because we have at our command the full use of our energy, it is not diverted into conflicts. We do not fritter it away, but utilize it for those unique and individual purposes that are a basic part of our Psychological experience.

Now, each whole self, or multidimensional personality, has its own purposes, missions, and creative endeavors that are initial and basic parts of itself and that determine those qualities that make it eternally valid and eternally seeking. We are finally free to utilize our energy in those directions. We face many challenges of quite momentous nature, and we realize that our purposes are not only important in themselves, but for the surprising offshoots that develop in our efforts to pursue them. In working for our purposes, we realize we are blazing trails that can also be used by others.

We also suspect - certainly I do - that the purposes themselves will have surprising results, astounding consequences that we have never realized, and that they will merely lead to new avenues. Realizing this helps us keep a sense of humor.

When one has been born and has died many times, expecting extinction with each death, and when this experience is followed by the realization that existence still continues, then a sense of the divine comedy enters in.

We are beginning to learn the creative joy of play. I believe, for example, that all creativity and consciousness is born in the quality of play, as opposed to work, in the quickened intuitional spontaneity that I see as a constant through all my own existences, and in the experience of those I know.

I communicate with your dimension, for example, not by willing myself to your level of reality, but by imagining myself there. All of my deaths would have been adventures had I realized what I know now. On the one hand you take life too seriously, and on the other, you do not take playful existence seriously enough.

We enjoy a sense of play that is highly spontaneous, and yet I suppose you would call it responsible play. Certainly it is creative play. We play, for example, with the mobility of our consciousness, seeing how "far" one can send it. We are constantly surprised at the products of our own consciousness, of the dimensions of reality through which we can hopscotch. It might seem that we use our consciousness idly in such play, and yet again, the pathways we make continue to exist and can be used by others. We leave messages to any who come by, mental signposts.

We can be highly motivated therefore, and yet use and understand the creative use of play, both as a method of attaining our goals and purposes and as a surprising and creative endeavor in itself.

Now, in my work as a teacher I travel into many dimensions of existence, even as a traveling professor might give lectures in various states or countries. Here, however, the resemblance ends, largely, since before I can begin to work I must set up preliminary psychological structures and learn to know my pupils before teaching can even begin.

I must have a thorough knowledge of the particular system of reality in which my pupil operates, of his or her system of thought, of the symbols that are meaningful. The stability of the pupil's personality must be correctly gauged by me. The needs of that personality cannot be ignored but must be taken into consideration.

The pupil must be encouraged, but not overly extended while development continues. My material must be presented in such a way that it makes sense in the context in which the pupil understands reality, particularly in the early stages. Great care must be utilized, even before serious learning can begin, that all levels of the personality develop at a more or less constant rate.

Often the material I present will initially be given without any sign of my presence, seemingly as a startling revelation. For no matter how carefully I present the material, it is still bound to change past ideas that are strongly a part of the pupil's personality. What I say is one thing, but the pupil of course is thrust into psychological and psychic behavior and experience that may seem quite alien to him on a conscious level.

The problems vary according to the system in which my pupil has his or her existence. In your system, for example, and in connection with the woman through whom I now write this book, initial contact on my part was made long before our sessions began.

The personality was never consciously aware of the initial meeting. She simply experienced sudden new thoughts, and since she is a poet, these appeared as poetic inspirations. At one time some years ago, at a writers' conference, she became involved in circumstances that could have led to her psychic development before she was ready. The psychological climate at that time, of those involved, initiated the conditions, and without realizing what she was about our friend [Jane] went into a trance.

I had known of her psychic gifts since her childhood, but the insights necessary were channeled through the poetry until the personality attained the necessary background that was needed in this particular case. In the affair just mentioned, therefore, I was informed and saw to it that the episode ended and was not pursued.

It was hardly an accidental performance, however. Quite without knowing it, the personality decided to try its wings, figuratively speaking. As a part of my work, therefore, I have been coaching the young woman in one way or another since her childhood - and all of this as a preliminary to the serious work that began with our sessions.

This is a normal part of my activity in many levels of existence. It is highly diversified work, for the personality structures vary. While within the systems in which I work there are certain basic similarities, in some dimensions I would not be equipped to be a teacher simply because the basic concepts of experience would be alien to my nature, and the learning processes themselves outside of my own experience.

Now your ideas of space are highly erroneous. So in my contacts with your sphere of activity, I do not sweep through bright golden skies like some spiritual superman into your physical domain.

I will go into this in a later chapter, but in a very real manner, space as you perceive it simply does not exist. Not only is the illusion of space caused by your own physical perceptive mechanisms, but it is also caused by mental patterns that you have accepted - patterns that are adopted by consciousness when it reaches a certain stage of "evolution" within your system.

When you arrive, or emerge, into physical life, not only is your mind not a blank slate, waiting for the scrolls that experience will write upon it, but you are already equipped with a memory bank far surpassing that of any computer. You face your first day upon the planet with skills and abilities already built in, though they may or may not be used; and they are not merely the result of heredity as you think of it.

You may think of your soul or entity - though only briefly and for the sake of this analogy - as some conscious and living, divinely inspired computer who programs its own existences and lifetimes. But this computer is so highly endowed with creativity that each of the various personalities it programs spring into consciousness and song, and in turn create realities that may have been undreamed of by the computer itself.

Each such personality, however, comes with a built-in idea of the reality in which it will operate, and its mental equipment is highly tailored to meet very specialized environments. It has full freedom, but it must operate within the context of existence to which it has been programmed. Within the personality, however, in the most secret recesses, is the condensed knowledge that resides in the computer as a whole. I must emphasize that I am not saying that the soul or entity is a computer, but only asking you to look at the matter in this light in order to make several points clear.

Each personality has within it the ability not only to gain a new type of existence in the environment - in your case in physical reality - but to add creatively to the very quality of its own consciousness, and in so doing to work its way through the specialized system, breaking the barriers of reality as it knows it.

Now, there is a purpose in all this that will also be discussed later. I mention this whole subject here, however, because I want you to see that your environment is not real in the terms that you imagine it to be. When you are born, then, you are already "conditioned" to perceive reality in a particular manner, and to interpret experience in a very limited but intense range.

I must explain this before I can clearly give you an idea of my environment, or of those other systems of reality in which I operate. There is no space between my environment and yours, for example, no physical boundaries that separate us. In a very real way, of speaking, your concept of reality as seen through your physical senses, sci- entific instruments, or arrived at through deduction, bears little resemblance to the facts - and the facts are difficult to explain.

Your planetary systems exist at once, simultaneously, both in time and in space. The universe that you seem to perceive, either visually or through instruments, appears to be composed of galaxies, stars, and planets, at various distances from you. Basically, however, this is an illusion. Your senses and your very existence as physical creatures program you to perceive the universe in such a way. The universe as you know it is your interpretation of events as they intrude upon your three-dimensional reality. The events are mental. This does not mean that you cannot travel to other planets, for example, within that physical universe, any more than it means that you cannot use tables to hold books, glasses, and oranges, although the table has no solid qualities of its own.

When I enter your system, I move through a series of mental and psychic events. You would interpret these events as space and time, and so often I must use the terms, for I must use your language rather than my own.

Root assumptions are those built-in ideas of reality of which I spoke those agreements upon which you base your ideas of existence. Space and time, for example, are root assumptions. Each system of reality has its own set of such agreements. When I communicate within your system, I must use and understand the root assumptions upon which it is based. As a teacher it is part of my job to understand and use these, and I have had existences in many such systems as a part of what you may call my basic training; though in your terms my associates and I had other names for them.

The entity, or the soul, has a far more creative and complicated nature than even your religions have ever granted it.

It utilizes numberless methods of perception, and it has at its command many other kinds of consciousness. Your idea of the soul is indeed limited by your three-dimensional concepts. The soul can change the focus of its consciousness, and uses consciousness as you use the eyes in your head. Now in my level of existence I am simply aware of the fact, strange as it may seem, that I am not my consciousness. My consciousness is an attribute to be used by me. This applies to each of the readers of this book, even though the knowledge may be hidden. Soul or entity, then, is more than consciousness.

When I enter your environment, I turn my consciousness in your direction, therefore. In one way, I translate what I am into an event that you can understand to some extent. In a much more limited manner, any artist does the same thing when he translates what he is, or a portion of it, into a painting. There is at least an evocative analogy there.

When I enter your system, I intrude into three-dimensional reality, and you must interpret what happens in the light of your own root assumptions. Now whether or not you realize it, each of you intrudes into other systems of reality in your dream states without the full participation of your normally conscious self. In subjective experience you leave behind physical existence and act, at times, with strong purpose and creative validity within dreams that you forget the instant you awaken.

When you think of the purpose of your existence, you think in terms of daily waking life, but you also work at your purpose in these other dream dimensions, and you are then in communication with other portions of your own entity, at work at endeavors quite as valid as those you are about in waking life.

When I contact your reality, therefore, it is as if I were entering one of your dreams. I can be aware of myself as I dictate this book through Jane Roberts, and yet also be aware of myself in my own environment; for I send only a portion of myself here, as you perhaps send out a portion of your consciousness as you write a letter to a friend, and yet are aware of the room in which you sit. I send out much more than you do in a letter, for a portion of my consciousness is now within the entranced woman as I dictate, but the analogy is close enough.

My environment, as I mentioned earlier, is not one of a personality recently dead in your terms, but later I will describe what you can expect under those conditions. One large difference between your environment and mine is that you must physically materialize mental acts as physical matter. We understand the reality of mental acts and recognize their brilliant validity. We accept them for what they are, and therefore we are beyond the necessity to materialize them and interpret them in such a rigid manner.

Your earth was very dear to me. I can now turn the focus of my consciousness toward it, and if I choose, experience it as you do; but I can also perceive it in many ways that you cannot in your time.

Now some of you who read this book will immediately and intuitively grasp what I am saying, for you will have already suspected that you are viewing experience through highly distorted, though colorful, figurative lenses. Remember also that if physical reality is in a larger sense an illusion, it is an illusion caused by a greater reality. The illusion itself has a purpose and a meaning.

Perhaps it is better to say that physical reality is one form that reality takes. In your system, however, you are focused much more intensely upon one relatively small aspect of experience.

We can travel freely through varying numbers of such realities. Our experience at this point includes our work in each. I do not mean to minimize the importance of your present personalities, nor of physical existence. To the contrary.

Three-dimensional experience is an invaluable place of training. Your personality as you now know it will indeed persevere, and with its memories, but it is only a part of your entire identity, even as your childhood in this life is an extremely important part of your present personality, though now you are far more than a child.

You will continue to grow and develop, and you will become aware of other environments, even as you left your childhood home. But environments are not objective things, conglomerations of objects that exist independently of you. Instead you form them and they are quite literally extensions of yourself; materialized mental acts that extend outward from your consciousness.

I will tell you exactly how you form your environment. I form mine following the same rules, though you end up with physical objects and I do not.

Your scientists are finally learning what philosophers have known for centuries - that mind can influence matter. They still have to discover the fact that mind creates and forms matter.

Now your closest environment, physically speaking, is your body. It is not like some manikin-shape in which you are imprisoned, that exists apart from you like a casing. Your body is not beautiful or ugly, healthy or deformed, swift or slow simply because this is the kind of body that was thrust upon you indiscriminately at birth. Instead your physical form, your corporeal personal environment, is the physical materialization of your own thoughts, emotions, and interpretations.

Quite literally, the "inner self" forms the body by magically transforming thoughts and emotions into physical counterparts. You grow the body. Its condition perfectly mirrors your subjective state at any given time. Using atoms and molecules, you build your body, forming basic elements into a form that you call your own.

You are intuitively aware that you form your image, and that you are independent of it. You do not realize that you create your larger environment and the physical world as you know it by propelling your thoughts and emotions into matter - a breakthrough into three-dimensional life. The inner self, therefore, individually and en masse, sends its psychic energy out, forming tentacles that coalesce into form.

Each emotion and thought has its own electromagnetic reality, completely unique. It is highly equipped to combine with certain others, according to the various ranges of intensity that you may include. In a manner of speaking, three-dimensional objects are formed in somewhat the same way that the images you see on your television screen are formed, but with a large difference. And if you are not tuned into that particular frequency, you will not perceive the physical objects at all.

Each of you act as transformers, unconsciously, automatically transforming highly sophisticated electromagnetic units into physical objects. You are in the middle of a "matter-concentrated system," surrounded, so to speak, by weaker areas in which what you would call "pseudomatter" persists. Each thought and emotion spontaneously exists as a simple or complex electromagnetic unit - unperceived, incidentally, as yet by your scientists.

The intensity determines both the strength and the permanency of the physical image into which the thought or emotion will be materialized. In my own material I am explaining this in depth. Here, I merely want you to understand that the world that you know is the reflection of an inner reality.

You are made basically of the same ingredients as a chair, a stone, a head of lettuce, a bird. In a gigantic cooperative endeavor, all consciousness joins together to make the forms that you perceive. Now, because this is known to us, we can change our environments and our own physical forms as we wish, and without confusion, for we perceive the reality that lies beneath.

We also realize that permanency of form is an illusion, since all consciousness must be in a state of change. We can be, in your terms, in several places at once because we realize the true mobility of consciousness. Now whenever you think emotionally of another person, you send out a counterpart of yourself, beneath the intensity of matter, but a definite form. This form, projecting outward from your own consciousness, completely escapes your egotistical attention. When I think emotionally of someone else, I do the same thing, except that a portion of my consciousness is within the image, and can communicate.

Environments are primarily mental creations of consciousness thrust out into many forms. I have a fourteenth-century study, my favorite, with which I am very pleased, for example. In your physical terms it does not exist, and I know quite well it is my mental production. Yet I enjoy it, and often take a physical form in order to sit at the desk and look out the window at the countryside.

Now you do the same thing when you sit in your living room, but you do not realize what you are doing; and presently you are somewhat restricted. When my associates and I meet, we often translate each other's thoughts into various shapes and forms out of pure enjoyment in the practice. We have what you might call a game, demanding some expertise, where for our own amusement we see which of us can translate any given thought into the most numerous forms.

There are such subtle qualities affecting the nature of all thought, such emotional gradations, that no one is ever identical - and incidentally, no physical object in your system is an exact duplicate of any other. The atoms and molecules that compose it - any object - have their own identities that color and qualify any object that they form.

You accept and perceive and focus upon continuities and similarities as you perceive physical objects of any kind, and in a very important manner you shut out and ignore dissimilarities out of a given field of actuality. Therefore you are very highly discriminating, accepting certain qualities and ignoring others. Your bodies not only change completely every seven years, for example. They change constantly with each breath.

Within the flesh, atoms and molecules constantly die and are replaced. The hormones are in a constant state of motion and alteration. Electromagnetic properties of skin and cell continually leap and change, and even reverse themselves. The physical matter that composed your body a moment ago is different in important ways from the matter that forms your body in this instant.

If you perceived the constant change within your body with as much persistence as you attend to its seemingly permanent nature, then you would be amazed that you ever considered the body as one more or less constant, more or less cohesive, entity. Even subjectively you focus upon and indeed manufacture the idea of a relatively stable, relatively permanent conscious self. You stress those ideas and thoughts and attitudes that you recall from "past" experience as your own, completely ignoring those that once were "characteristic" and now are vanished - ignoring the fact also that you cannot hold thought. The thought of a moment before, in your terms, vanishes away.

You try to maintain a constant, relatively permanent physical and subjective self in order to maintain a relatively constant, relatively permanent environment. So you are always in a position of ignoring such change. Those that you refuse to acknowledge are precisely those that would give you a much better understanding of the true nature of reality, individual subjectivity, and the physical environment that seems to surround you.

What happens to a thought when it leaves your conscious mind? It does not simply disappear. You can learn to follow it, but you are usually frightened of turning your attention away from its intense focus in three-dimensional existence. Therefore, it seems that the thought disappears. It seems also that your subjectivity has a mysterious unknown quality about it, and that even your mental life has a sort of insidious dropping-off point, a subjective cliff over which thoughts and memories fall, to disappear into nothingness. Therefore to protect yourself, to protect your subjectivity from drifting, you erect various psychological barriers at what you suppose to be the danger points. Instead, you see, you can follow these thoughts and emotions simply by realizing that your own reality continues in another direction, beside the one with which you mainly identify. For these thoughts and emotions that have left your conscious mind will lead you into other environments.

These subjective openings through which thoughts seem to disappear are in fact like psychic warps, connecting the self that you know with other universes of experience - realities where symbols come to life and thoughts are not denied their potential.

There is communication between these other realities and your own in your dream states, and a constant interaction between both systems. If there is any point where your own consciousness seems to elude you or escape you, or if there is any point where your consciousness seems to end, then these are the points where you have yourselves set up psychological and psychic barriers, and these are precisely those areas that you should explore. Otherwise you feel as if your consciousness is enclosed within your skull, immobile and constricted, and every lost thought or forgotten memory at least symbolically seems like a small death. And such is not the case.

CHAPTER 4

REINCARNATIONAL DRAMAS

Your own environment includes far more than you may have supposed. Earlier I referred to your environment in terms of the daily physical existence and surroundings with which you are currently connected. In actuality, you are aware of very little of your larger, more extensive environment. Consider your present self as an actor in a play; hardly a new analogy, but a suitable one. The scene is set in the twentieth century. You create the props, the settings, the themes; in fact you write, produce, and act in the entire production - you and every other individual who takes part.

You are so focused in your roles, however; so intrigued by the reality that you have created, so entranced by the problems, challenges, hopes, and sorrows of your particular roles that you have forgotten they are of your own creation. This intensely moving drama, with all its joys and tragedies, can be compared with your present life, your present environment, both individually and en masse.

But there are other plays going on simultaneously, in which you also have a part to play. These have their own scenery, their own props. They take place in different periods of time. One may be called "Life in the twelfth century A.D." One may be called "Life in the eighteenth century," or "in 500 B.C.," or "in A.D. 3000." You also create these plays and act in them. These settings also represent your environment, the environment that surrounds your entire personality.

I am speaking of the portion of you who is taking part in this particular period piece, however; and that particular portion of your entire personality is so focused within this drama that you are not aware of the others in which you also play a role. You do not understand your own multidimensional reality; therefore it seems strange or unbelievable when I tell you that you live many existences at one time. It is difficult for you to imagine being in two places at once, much less in two or more times, or centuries.

Now stated simply, time is not a series of moments. The words that you speak, the acts that you perform, appear to take place in time, as a chair or table appears to take up space. These appearances however are a part of the complicated props that you have set up "beforehand," and within the play you must accept these as real.

Four o'clock in the afternoon is a very handy reference. You can say to a friend, "I will meet you at four o'clock at the corner," or at a restaurant, for a drink or a chat or a meal, and your friend will know precisely where and when he will find you. This will happen despite the fact that four o'clock in the afternoon has no basic meaning, but is an agreed-upon designation - a gentlemen's agreement, if you prefer. If you attend the theatre at nine o'clock in the evening, but the actions of the play take place within the morning hours, and the actors are shown eating breakfast, you accept the time as given within the theatre's play. You also pretend that it is morning.

Each of you are now involved in a much larger production, in which you all agree on certain basic assumptions that serve as a framework within which the play can occur. The assumptions are that time is a series of moments one after another; that an objective world exists quite independently of your own creation and perception of it; that you are bound within the physical bodies that you have donned; and that you are limited by time and space.

Other assumptions accepted for the same reason include the idea that all perception comes through your physical senses; in other words, that all information comes from without, and that no information can come from within. You therefore are forced to focus intensely upon the actions of the play. Now these various plays, these creative period pieces represent what you would call reincarnational lives.

They all exist basically at one time. Those who are still involved in these highly complicated passion-play seminars called reincarnational existences, find it difficult to see beyond them. Some, resting between productions, as it were, try to communicate with those who are still taking part; but they themselves are merely in the wings, so to speak, and can only see so far.

The plays seem to be taking place one before the other, and so these communications seem to intensify the false idea that time is a series of moments, passing in a single line from some inconceivable beginning to some equally inconceivable end.

This leads you to think in terms of a very limited progress both in individual terms and in terms of your species as a whole. You think, those of you who have even considered reincarnation, "Well, certainly the race must have progressed from the time of the Middle Ages," although you greatly fear it has not; or you turn to technological progress and say, "At least we have come a long way in that direction."

You may smile and think to yourself that it is quite difficult to imagine a Roman senator addressing the multitudes through a microphone, for example; his children, watching his performance on television. But all of this is highly misleading. Progress does not exist in the terms that you consider it to, any more than time does.

In each play, both individually and en masse, different problems are set up. Progress can be measured in terms of the particular ways in which those problems were solved or not solved. Great advances have been made in certain periods. For example, great offshoots appeared that from your viewpoint you might not consider progress at all.

In some plays, generally speaking, the actors are each working on a seemingly minute portion of a larger problem that the play itself is to resolve.

Though I use the analogy here of a drama, these "plays" are highly spontaneous affairs in which the actors have full freedom within the play's framework. And granting these assumptions that have been stated, there are no rehearsals. There are observers, as you will see later in our book. As in any good theatre production, there is an overall theme within each play. The great artists, for example, did not emerge out of a particular time simply because they were born into it, or the conditions were favorable.

The play itself was concerned with the actualization of intuitive truth into what you would call artistic form, with a creativity of such vast and sweeping results that it would serve to awaken latent abilities within each actor and to serve as a model of behavior.

Periods of renaissance - spiritual, artistic, or psychic - occur because the intense inner focus of those involved in the drama are directed toward those ends. The challenge may be different in each play, but the great themes are beacons to all consciousness. They serve as models.

Progress has nothing to do with time, you see, but with psychic and spiritual focus. Each play is entirely different from any other. It is not correct, therefore, to suppose that your actions in this life are caused by a previous existence, or that you are being punished in this life for crimes in a past one. The lives are simultaneous.

Your own multidimensional personality is so endowed that it can have these experiences and still retain its identity. It is, of course, affected by the various plays in which it takes part. There is instant communication and an instant, if you prefer, feedback system.

These plays are hardly without purpose. In them the multidimensional personality learns through its own actions. It tries out an endless variety of poses, behavior patterns, attitudes, and changes others as a result.

The word "result," you see, automatically infers cause and effect - the cause happening before the effect, and this is simply one small example of the strength of such distortions, and of the inherent difficulties involved with verbal thought, for it always implies a single-line delineation.

You are the multidimensional self who has these existences, who creates and takes part in these cosmic passion plays, so to speak. It is only because you focus in this particular role now that you identify your entire being with it. You have set these rules for yourself for a reason. And consciousness is in a state of becoming, and so this mul-tidimensional self of which I speak is not a psychological structure completed and done with. It is also in a state of becoming.

It is learning the art of actualization. It has within it infinite sources of creativity, unlimited possibilities of development. But it has yet to learn the means of actualization, and must find within itself ways to bring into existence those untold creations that are within it.

Therefore it creates varieties of conditions in which to operate, and sets itself challenges, some doomed to failure in your terms, at least initially, because it must first create the conditions which will bring new creations about. And all of this is done with great spontaneity and unbounded joy.

You therefore create far more environments than you realize. Now, each actor, going about the role, focused within the play, has an inner guide line. He is not left, therefore, abandoned within a play that he has forgotten in his own creation. He has knowledge and information that comes to him through what I call the inner senses.

He has other sources of information, therefore, than those strictly given within the confines of the production. Each actor knows this instinctively, and there are periods set and allowed for within the play itself in which each actor retires in order to refresh himself. In these he is informed through the inner senses of his other roles, and he realizes that he is far more than the self appearing in any given play.

In these periods he understands that he had his hand in the writing of the play, and he is freed from those assumptions that bind him while he is actively concerned with the drama's activities. These periods, of course, coincide with your sleep states and dreaming conditions; but there are also other times when each actor sees quite clearly that he is surrounded by props, and when his vision suddenly pierces the seeming reality of the production.

This does not mean that the play is not real, or that it should not be taken seriously. It does mean playing a role - an important one. Each actor must of himself realize, however, the nature of the production and his part in it. He must actualize himself out of the threedimensional confines of the play's setting.

There is great cooperation behind such momentous productions, and in playing his role, each actor first actualizes himself within three -dimensional reality. The multidimensional self cannot act within three-dimensional reality until it materializes a portion of itself within it.

Within this reality, it then brings about all kinds of creativity and development that could not appear otherwise. It must then propel itself from this system however, through another act, another actualization on the part of itself that is three-dimensional.

During its three-dimensional existence it has helped others in ways that they could not otherwise be helped, and it has been itself benefited and developed in ways that would be impossible otherwise.

The meaning of the play is within you, therefore. It is only the conscious portion of you that acts so well, and that is focused so securely within the props of the production.

The purpose of any given life is available to you, the knowledge beneath the surface of the conscious self you know. All kinds of hints and clues are also available. You have the knowledge of your entire multidimensional personality at your fingertips. When you realize that you do, this knowledge allows you to solve the problems or meet the challenges you have set, quicker, in your terms; and also opens further areas of creativity by which the entire play or production can be enriched.

To the extent, therefore, that you allow the intuitions and knowledge of the multidimensional self to flow through the conscious self, to that extent not only do you perform your role in the play more effectively, but also you add new energy, insights, and creativity to the entire dimension.

Now it seems to you, of course, that you are the only conscious part of yourself, for you are identifying with the actor in this particular production. The other portions of your multidimensional personality, in these other reincarnational plays, are also conscious, however. And because you are a multidimensional consciousness, "you" are also conscious in other realities beside these.

Your multidimensional personality, your true identity, the real you, is conscious of itself, as itself, in any of these roles.

These "period pieces," overall, have a particular purpose. By the very nature of consciousness, it seeks to materialize itself in as many dimensions as possible - to create from itself new levels of awareness, new offshoots. In doing so it creates all reality. Reality, therefore, is always in a state of becoming. The thoughts that you think, for example, in your actor's roles, are still completely unique and lead to new creativity. Certain aspects of your own consciousness could be fulfilled in no other way.

When you think of reincarnation, you suppose a series of progressions. Instead the various lives grow out of what your inner self is. They are not thrust upon you by some outside agency. They are a material development, as your consciousness opens up and expresses itself in as many ways as possible. It is not restricted to one three-dimensional lifetime, nor is it restricted to three-dimensional existence alone.

Your consciousness then takes many forms, and these forms need not be alike any more, say, than a caterpillar is like a butterfly. The soul or entity has complete freedom of expression. It changes its form to suit its expression, and it forms environments like stage settings, and worlds to suit its purposes. Each setting brings forth new developments.

The soul or entity is highly individualized spiritual energy. It forms whatever body you now wear, and is the motive power behind your physical survival, for from it you derive your vitality. Consciousness can never be still, but seeks further creativity.

The soul, therefore, or entity, endows three-dimensional reality, and the three-dimensional self with its own properties. The abilities of the entity lie within the three-dimensional self. The three-dimensional self, the actor, has access to this information and to these potentials. In learning to use these potentials, in learning to rediscover its relationship with the entity, the three-dimensional self raises still further the level of achievement, comprehension, and creativity. The three-dimensional self becomes more than it knows.

Not only is the entity strengthened, but portions of it, having been Actualized in three-dimensional existence, now add to the very quality and nature of that existence. Without this creativity, planetary life in Your terms would always be sterile. The soul or entity then gives breath to the body, and to the three-dimensional self within it. The three-dimensional self then goes about its purpose of opening up new areas of creativity.

Entities or souls, in other words, send out portions of themselves to open up avenues of reality that would not exist otherwise. The three-dimensional selves, in existing within these realities, must focus their attention there completely. An inner awareness gives them a source of energy and strength. They must, however, come to understand their roles as actors, "finally" from their roles, and through another act of comprehension, return to the entity.

There are those who appear within these plays fully aware. These personalities willingly take roles, knowing that they are roles, in order to lead the others toward the necessary realization and development. They lead the actors to see beyond the selves and settings they have created. These personalities from other levels of existence oversee the play, so to speak, and appear among the actors. Their purpose is to open up within the three-dimensional selves those psychological doorways that will release the three-dimensional self for further development in another system of reality.

You are learning to be cocreators. You are learning to be gods as you now understand the term. You are learning responsibility - the responsibility of any individualized consciousness. You are learning to handle the energy that is yourself, for creative purposes.

You will be bound to those you love and those you hate, though you will learn to release and lose and dissipate the hatred. You will learn to use even hatred creatively and to turn it to the higher ends, to transform it finally into love. I will make this clearer in later chapters.

The settings in your physical environment, the sometimes lovely paraphernalia, the physical aspects of life as you know it, are all camouflages, and so I call your physical reality a camouflage. Yet these camouflages are composed of the vitality of the universe. The rocks and stones and mountains and earth are living camouflage, interlocking psy-chic webs formed by minute consciousnesses that you cannot perceive as such. The atoms and molecules within them have their own consciousness, as do the atoms and molecules with your body.

Since you all have a hand in forming this physical setting, and since you are ensconced yourself in a physical form, then using the physical senses you will only perceive this fantastic setting. The reality that exists both within it and beyond it will elude you. Even the actor is not entirely three-dimensional, however. He is a part of a multidimensional self.

Within him there are methods of perception that allow him to see through the camouflage settings, to see beyond the stage. He uses these inner senses constantly, though the actor part of himself is so intent upon the play that this escapes him. In a large manner, the physical senses actually form the physical reality they seem to only perceive. They are themselves part of the camouflage, but they are like lenses over your natural inner perceptions that force you to "see" an available field of activity as physical matter; and so they can be relied upon only to tell you what is happening in a superficial manner. You can tell the position of the other actors for example, or time by clock, but these physical senses will not tell you that time is itself a camouflage, or that consciousness forms the other actors, or that realities that you cannot see exist over and beyond the physical matter that is so apparent.

You can, however, using your inner senses, perceive reality as it exists apart from the play and your role in it. In order to do this you must, of course, momentarily at least turn your attention away from the constant activity that is taking place - turn off the physical senses, as it were - and switch your attention to those events that have escaped you earlier.

Highly simplified indeed, the effect would be something like changing one set of glasses for another, for the physical senses are as artificial, basically speaking, to the inner self, as a set of glasses or a hearing aid is to the physical self. The inner senses, therefore, are but rarely used completely consciously.

You would be more than disoriented, for example, but quite terrified, if between one moment and the next your familiar environment as you knew it disappeared to be replaced by other sets of data that you were not ready to understand, so much information from the inner senses must be translated in terms that you can comprehend. Such information must somehow make sense to you as three-dimensional selves, in other words.

Your particular set of camouflages is not the only set, you see. Other realities have entirely different systems, but all personalities have inner senses that are attributes of consciousness, and through these inner senses communications are maintained about which the normally conscious self knows little. Part of my purpose is to make some of these communications known.

The soul or entity, then, is not the self that reads this book. Your environment is not simply the world about you as you know it, but also consists of past life environments upon which you are not now focusing. Your real environment is composed of your thoughts and emotions, for from these you form not only this reality but each reality in which you take part.

Your real environment is innocent of space and time as you know them. In your real environment you have no need for words, for communication is instantaneous. In your real environment you form the physical world that you know.

The inner senses will allow you to perceive the reality that is independent of physical form. I will ask you all to momentarily forsake your roles therefore, and to try this simple exercise.

Now, pretend that you are on a lighted stage, the stage being the room in which you now sit. Close your eyes and pretend that the lights have gone out, the setting has disappeared and you are alone.

Everything is dark. Be quiet. Imagine as vividly as you can the existence of inner senses. For now pretend that they correspond to your physical ones. Clear from your mind all thoughts and worries. Be receptive. Very gently listen, not to physical sounds but to sounds that come through the inner senses.

Images may begin to appear. Accept them as sights quite as valid as those you see physically. Pretend that there is an inner world, and that it will be revealed to you as you learn to perceive it with these inner senses.

Pretend that you have been blind to this world all your life, and are now slowly gaining sight within it. Do not judge the whole inner world by the disjointed images that you may at first perceive, or by the sounds that you may at first hear, for you will still be using your inner senses quite imperfectly.

Do this simple exercise for a few moments before sleep or in the resting state. It may also be done even in the midst of an ordinary task that does not take all of your attention.

You will simply be learning to focus in a new dimension of awareness, taking quick snapshots, as it were, in a strange environment. Remember that you will only be perceiving snatches. Simply accept them, but do not attempt to make any overall judgments or interpretations at this stage.

Ten minutes a day to begin with is quite sufficient. Now the information in this book is being directed to some extent through the inner senses of the woman who is in trance as I write it. Such endeavor is the result of highly organized inner precision, and of training. Ruburt could not receive the information from me, it could not be translated nor interpreted while she was focused intensely in the physical environment. So the inner senses are channels that provide communication between various dimensions of existence. Yet even here the information must be distorted to some extent as it is translated into physical terms. Otherwise it would not be perceived at all.

I have spent some time emphasizing the fact that each of us forms our own environment, because I want you to realize that the responsibility for your life and your environment is your own.

If you believe otherwise, then you are limited; your environment then represents the sum total of knowledge and experience. As long as you believe your environment to be objective and independent of yourself, then to a large extent you feel powerless to change it, to see beyond it, or to imagine other alternatives that may be less apparent. Later in the book I will explain various methods that will allow you to change your environment beneficially and drastically.

I have also discussed reincarnation in terms of environment because many schools of thought over-emphasize the effects- of reincarnational existences, so that often they explain present-life circumstances as a result of rigid and uncompromising patterns determined in a "past" life. You will feel relatively incompetent to handle present physical reality, to alter your environment, to affect and change your world, if you feel that you are at the mercy of conditions over which you have no control.

The reasons given for such subjugations matter little in the long run, for the reasons change with the times and with your culture. You are not under a sentence placed upon you for original sin, by any childhood events, or by past life experience. Your life, for example, may be far less fulfilling than you think you would prefer. You may be less when you would be more, but you are not under a pall placed upon your psyche, either by original sin, Freud's infancy syndromes, or past life influences. I will try to explain the past life influences a bit more clearly here. They affect you as any experience does. Time is not closed, however - it is open. One life is not buried in the past, disconnected from the present self and any future self as well.

As I explained earlier, the lives or the plays are happening at once. Creativity and consciousness are never linear achievements. In each life you choose and create your own settings or environments; and in this one you chose your parents and whatever childhood incidents that came within your experience. You wrote the script.

Like a true absent-minded professor, the conscious self forgets all this, however, so when tragedy appears in the script, difficulty or challenges, the conscious self looks for someone or something to blame. Before this book is done I hope to show you precisely how you create each minute of your experience so that you can begin to exert your true creative responsibility on a conscious level - or nearly so.

As you read this book, now and then look about you at the room in which you sit. Chairs and tables, the ceilings and the floors, may seem very real and solid - quite permanent - while you by contrast may feel yourself to be highly vulnerable, caught in a moment between birth and extinction. You may even feel jealous when you think of it, imagining that the physical universe will continue to exist long after you are gone. By the end of our book, however, I hope you will realize the eternal validity of your own consciousness, and the impermanence of those physical aspects of your environment, and of your universe, that now seem so secure.

CHAPTER 5

HOW THOUGHTS FORM MATTER - COORDINATION POINTS

As you read the words upon this page, you realize that the information that you are receiving is not an attribute of the letters of the words themselves. The printed line does not contain information. It transmits information. Where is the information that is being transmitted then, if it is not upon the page?

The same question of course applies when you read a newspaper, and when you speak to another person. Your actual words convey information, feelings, or thoughts. Obviously the thoughts or the feelings, and the words, are not the same thing. The letters upon the page are symbols, and you have agreed upon various meanings connected with them. You take it for granted without even thinking of it that the sym-bols - the letters - are not the reality - the information or thoughts - which they attempt to convey.

Now in the same way, I am telling you that objects are also symbols that stand for a reality whose meaning the objects, like the letters, transmit. The true information is not in the objects any more than the thought is in the letters or in words. Words are methods of expression. So are physical objects in a different kind of medium. You are used to the idea that you express yourselves directly through words. You can hear yourself speak them. You can feel the muscles in your throat move, and if you are aware, you can perceive multitudinous reactions within your own body - actions that all accompany your speech.

Physical objects are the result of another kind of expression. You create them as surely as you create words. I do not mean that you create them with your hands alone, or through manufacture. I mean that objects are natural by-products of the evolution of your species, even as words are. Examine for a moment your knowledge of your own speech, however. Though you hear the words and recognize their appropriateness, and though they may more or less approximate an expression of your feeling, they are not your feeling, and there must be a gap between your thought and your expression of it.

The familiarity of speech begins to vanish when you realize that you, yourself, when you begin a sentence do not know precisely how you will end it, or even how you form the words. You do not consciously know how you manipulate a staggering pyramid of symbols, picking from them precisely those you need to express a given thought. For that matter, you do not know how you think.

You do not know how you translate these symbols upon this page into thoughts, and then store them, or make them your own. Since the mechanisms of normal speech are so little known to you on a conscious level, then it is not surprising that you are equally unaware of more complicated tasks that you also perform - such as the constant creation of your physical environment as a method of communication and expression.

It is only from this viewpoint that the true nature of physical matter can be understood. It is only by comprehending the nature of this constant translation of thoughts and desires - not into words now, but into physical objects - that you can realize your true independence from circumstance, time, and environment.

Now, it is easy to see that you translate feelings into words or bodily expressions and gestures, but not quite as easy to realize that you form your physical body as effortlessly and unselfconsciously as you translate feelings into symbols that become words.

You have heard the expression before, I am sure, that the environment expresses a particular individual's personality. I am telling you that this is a literal and not symbolic truth. The letters upon the page have the reality only of ink and paper. The information they convey is invisible. As an object, this book itself is only paper and ink. It is a carrier of information.

You may perhaps argue that the book was manufactured physically, and did not suddenly erupt through Ruburt's skull, already printed and bound. You in turn had to borrow or purchase the book, so you may think, "Surely, I did not create the book, as I created my words." But before we are finished we will see that basically speaking, each of you create the book you hold in your hands, and that your entire physical en-vironment comes as naturally out of your inner mind as words come out of your mouths, and that man forms physical objects as unselfconsciously and as automatically as he forms his own breath.

The peculiar, particular aspects of your physical world are dependent upon your existence and focus within it. The physical universe does not contain physical objects of solidity, width and depth, for example, to those whose existence is not within it.

Other kinds of consciousness coexist within the same "space" that your world inhabits. They do not perceive your physical objects, for their reality is composed of a different camouflage structure. You do not perceive them, and generally speaking they do not perceive you. This is a general statement, however, for various points of your realities can and do coincide, so to speak.

These points are not recognized as such, but they are points of what you could call double reality, containing great energy potential; coordinate points, indeed, where realities merge. There are main coordinate points, pure mathematically, sources of fantastic energy, and subordinate coordinate points, vast in number.

There are four absolute coordinate points that intersect all realities. These coordinate points also act as channels through which energy flows, and as warps or invisible paths from one reality to another. They also act as transformers, and provide much of the generating energy that makes creation continuous in your terms.

Your space is filled with these subordinate points, and as you will see later, these are important in allowing you to transform thoughts and emotions into physical matter. When a thought or emotion attains a certain intensity, it automatically attracts the power of one of these subordinate points, and is therefore highly charged, and in one way magnified, though not in size.

These points impinge upon what you call time, as well as space. There are certain points in time and space, therefore, (again in your terms), that are more conducive than others, where both ideas and matter will be more highly charged. Practically speaking, this means that buildings will last longer; in your context, that ideas wedded to form will be relatively eternal. The pyramids, for example, are a case in point.

These coordinate points - absolute, main, or subordinate - represent accumulations or traces of pure energy, minute to an extreme if you are thinking in terms of size - smaller than any particle of which your scientists know for example, but composed of pure energy. And yet this energy must be activated. It is dormant until then - and it cannot be activated physically.

A few clues here that might help you, or mathematicians. There is an ever-so-minute alteration of gravity forces in the neighborhood of all of these points, even of the subordinate ones, and all the so-called physical laws to some extent or another will be found to have a wavering effect in these neighborhoods. The subordinate points also serve in a way as supports, as structural intensification within the unseen fabric of energy that forms all realities and manifestations. While they are traces or accumulations of pure energy, there is a great difference between the amount of energy available in the various subordinate points, and between the main and the absolute points.

These are points, therefore, of concentrated energy. The subordinate points are far more common, and practically speaking, affect your daily concerns. There are better places than others to build houses or structures - points where health and vitality are strengthened, where, other things being equal, plants will grow and flourish and where all beneficial conditions seem to meet.

Some people can sense such neighborhoods instinctively. They occur within certain angles made by coordinate points. The points obviously are not themselves physical - that is, they are not visible, though they may be mathematically deduced. They are felt, however, as intensified energy.

In a given room, plants will grow more effectively in a particular area than in other areas, providing that both areas contain such necessary requirements as light. All of your space is permeated by these coordination points, so that certain invisible angles are formed.

This is highly simplified, but some angles will be more "on the outskirts" than others, and will be less favorable for all conditions of growth and activity. In speaking of these angles we will treat them as three-dimensional, though they are of course multidimensional. Since the nature of these angles is not the main topic of my book, it is not possible to explain them thoroughly here. They will seem to be stronger during certain times than other times, though these differences have nothing to do with either the nature of the coordinate points or with the nature of time. Other elements affect them, but we need not be concerned with these now.

The concentrated energy points are activated by emotional intensities that are well within your normal range. Your own emotions or feelings will activate these coordinates whether you know of them or not. Greater energy will therefore be added to the original thought or feeling, and its projection into physical matter accelerated. Now this applies regardless of the nature of the feeling; only its intensity is involved here.

These points are like invisible power plants, in other words, activated when any emotional feeling or thought of sufficient intensity comes into contact. The points themselves intensify whatever activates them in a quite neutral manner.

This is highly simplified, but the subjective experience of any consciousness is automatically expressed as electromagnetic energy units. These exist "beneath" the range of physical matter. They are, if you prefer, incipient particles that have not yet emerged into matter.

These units are natural emanations from all kinds of consciousness. They are the invisible formations resulting from reaction to any kind of stimuli. They very seldom exist in isolation, but unite under certain laws. They change both their form and their pulsation. Their relative "duration" depends upon the original intensity behind them - that is, behind the original thought, emotion, stimuli, or reaction that brought them into being.

Again, highly simplified here, under certain conditions these coagulate into matter. Those electromagnetic units of high enough intensity automatically activate the subordinate coordinate points of which I have spoken. They are, therefore, accelerated and propelled into matter far more quickly, in your terms, than units of lesser intensity. Molecules would appear as large as planets to these units. Atoms and mol-ecules and planets and these electromagnetic energy units are simply different manifestations of the same principles that bring the units themselves into being. It is only your relative position, your focus within an apparent space and time, that makes this seem so unlikely.

Each thought or emotion therefore exists as an electromagnetic energy unit or as a combination of these under certain conditions, and often with the help of coordinate points, they emerge into the building blocks of physical matter. This emergence into matter occurs as a neutral "result" regardless of the nature of any given thought or emotion. Mental images, accompanied by strong emotion, are blueprints therefore upon which a corresponding physical object, or condition or event, will in your terms appear.

The intensity of a feeling or thought or mental image is, therefore, the important element in determining its subsequent physical materialization.

The intensity is the core about which the electromagnetic energy units form. In your terms, the more intense the core, the sooner the physical materialization. This would apply whether the mental image was a fearful one or a joyful one. Now there is a very important problem here: If your turn of mind is highly intense and you think in vivid mental emotional images, these will be swiftly formed into physical events. If you are also of a highly pessimistic nature, given to thoughts and feelings of potential disaster, then these thoughts will be quite faithfully reproduced in experience.

The more intense your imagination and inner experience, therefore, the more important it is that you realize the methods by which this inner experience becomes physically real. Your thoughts and emotions begin their journey into physical actualization at the moment of conception. If you happen to live in an area where the coordinate environment is strong, one of those areas I have spoken of as unusually conducive, then it will seem that you are deluged by illnesses or disasters, if these are the nature of your thoughts, because all thought is so fertile in this environment. If, on the other hand, your feelings and subjective experience are fairly well balanced, fairly optimistic and creative in a constructive manner, then it will seem to you that you have been blessed with unusual luck, for your pleasant suppositions will come to pass so quickly.

Briefly, in your own country, the West Coast, portions of the East Coast, Utah, the Great Lakes, the Chicago area, the Minneapolis area, and some other southwestern areas, are in those neighborhoods of excellent coordinate activity, for the reasons given. Materialization will quickly appear, and potentials therefore for both constructive and destructive elements are high.

These coordinate points themselves activate the behavior of atoms and molecules as, say for example, the sun aids the growth of plants. The coordinates activate the generating behavior of atoms and molecules, and greatly encourage their cooperative abilities; their tendency to swarm, so to speak, into organizations and structural groupings.

The coordinate points magnify or intensify the behavior, the latent spontaneity inherent within the properties of physical matter. They act as psychic generators, propelling what is not yet physical into physical form.

Now, this is not to be a technical book, so this is not the time nor place to discuss thoroughly the action, behavior or effects of these coordinate points; nor of the electromagnetic energy units - those natural emanations of consciousness of which I spoke. I want it known, however, that thoughts and emotions are formed into physical matter by very definite methods and through laws quite valid, though they may be presently unknown.

In other portions of the Seth material these processes will be made very clear for those of you who desire to pursue the question further, or those who may be interested from a scientific point of view. Here, we are discussing such issues only because they touch upon the multidimensional aspect of personality. They allow you to materialize certain subjective experiences into three-dimensional reality. Before I leave the subject, however, let me remind you that these emanations in varying degrees rise from all consciousness, not simply your own. This includes cellular consciousness as well, so that an invisible network of electromagnetic units pervades your entire atmosphere; and upon this webwork and from it, the particles of physical matter are then formed.

A whole book could easily be written upon this subject. Information regarding the "locations" of main and absolute coordinate points could be highly advantageous, for example. You pride yourselves on your technology, and the production of durable goods, buildings and roads, yet many of these are insignificant when compared to other structures within the "past."

A true understanding of the way in which an idea becomes physical matter would result in a complete revamping of your so-called modern technology, and in buildings, roads, and other structures that would far outlast those you now have. While the psychic reality behind physical matter is ignored, then you cannot use those methods effectively that do exist, nor can you take advantage of them. You cannot understand the psychic reality that is the true impetus for your physical existence unless you first realize your own psychic reality, and independence from physical laws.

My first purpose, therefore, is to make you aware of the inner identity of which you are part, and to clear away some of the intellectual and superstitious debris that prevents you from recognizing your own potentialities and freedom. Then perhaps you can begin to learn the many ways in which that freedom can be used.

CHAPTER 6

THE SOUL AND THE NATURE OF ITS PERCEPTION

With the little background given so far, we can at least begin to discuss the subject of this book: The eternal validity of the soul. Even when we are exploring other issues, we will be trying to illustrate the multidimensional aspect of this inner self. There are many misconceptions connected with it, and first of all we shall try to dismiss these.

First of all, a soul is not something that you have. It is what you are. I usually use the term "entity" in preference to the term "soul," simply because those particular misconceptions are not so connected with the word "entity," and its connotations are less religious in an organizational sense.

The trouble is that you frequently consider the soul or entity as a finished, static "thing" that belongs to you but is not you. The soul or entity - in other words, your most intimate powerful inner identity is and must be forever changing. It is not, therefore, something like a cherished heirloom. It is alive, responsive, curious. It forms the flesh and the world that you know, and it is in a state of becoming.

Now, in the three-dimensional reality in which your ego has its main focus, becoming presupposes arrival, or a destination - an ending to that which has been in a state of becoming. But the soul or entity has its existence basically in other dimensions, and in these, fulfillment is not dependent upon arrivals at any points, spiritual or otherwise.

The soul or entity is always in a state of flux, or learning, and of developments that have to do with subjective experience rather than with time or space. This is not nearly as mysterious as it might sound. Each of my readers plays a game in which the egotistical conscious self pretends not to know what the whole self definitely does know. Since the ego is definitely a part of the whole self, then it must necessarily be basically aware of such knowledge. In its intense focus in physical reality, however, it pretends not to know, until it feels able to utilize the information in physical terms.

You do have access to the inner self, therefore. You are hardly cut off from your own soul or entity. The ego prefers to consider itself the captain at the helm, so to speak, since it is the ego who most directly deals with the sometimes tumultuous seas of physical reality, and it does not want to be distracted from this task.

Channels, psychological and psychic, always exist, sending communications back and forth through the various levels of the self, and the ego accepts necessary information and data from inner portions of the personality without question. Its position in fact depends in a large manner upon this unquestioning acceptance of inner data. The ego, in other words, the "exterior" self that you think of as your self - that portion of you maintains its safety and its seeming command precisely because inner layers of your own personality constantly uphold it, keep the physical body operating, and maintain communications with the multitudinous stimuli that come both from outside conditions and inside conditions. The soul or entity is not diminished but expanded through reincarnations, through existence and experience in probable realities - something that I will explain later.

It is only because you have a highly limited conception of your own entity that you insist upon its being almost sterile in its singularity. There are millions of cells within your body, but you call your body a unit, and consider it your own. You do form it, from the inside out, and yet you form it from living substance, and each smallest particle has its own living consciousness. There are clumps of matter, and in that respect there are clumps of consciousness, each individual, with their own destiny and abilities and potentials. There are no limitations to your own entity: therefore, how can your entity or soul have boundaries, for boundaries would enclose it and deny it freedom.

Often it seems that the soul is thought of as a precious stone, to be finally presented as a gift to God, or considered as some women used to consider their virginity - something highly prized that must be lost; the losing of it being signified as a fine gift to the receiver.

In many philosophies this sort of idea is retained - the soul being returned to a primal giver, or being dissolved in a nebulous state somewhere between being and nonbeing. The soul is, however, first of all creative. It can be discussed from many viewpoints. Its characteristics can be given to some degree, and indeed most of my readers could find out these characteristics for themselves if they were highly enough motivated, and if this was their main concern. The soul or entity is itself the most highly motivated, most highly energized, and most potent consciousness-unit known in any universe.

It is energy concentrated to a degree quite unbelievable to you. It contains potentials unlimited, but it must work out its own identity and form its own worlds. It carries within it the burden of all being. Within it are personality potentials beyond your comprehension. Remember, this is your own soul or entity I am speaking of, as well as soul or entity in general. You are one manifestation of your own soul. How many of you would want to limit your reality, your entire reality, to the experience you now know? You do this when you imagine that your present self is your entire personality, or insist that your identity be maintained unchanged through an endless eternity.

Such an eternity would be dead indeed. In many ways the soul is an incipient god, and later in this book we will discuss the "god concept." For now, however, we will simply be concerned with the entity or soul, the larger self that whispers even now in the hidden recesses of each reader's experience. I hope in this book not only to assure you of the eternal validity of your soul or entity, but to help you sense its vital reality within yourself. First of all, however, you must have some idea of your own psychological and psychic structure. When you understand to some extent who and what you are, then I can explain more clearly who and what I am. I hope to acquaint you with those deeply creative aspects of your own being, so that you can use these to extend and expand your entire experience.

Many individuals imagine the soul to be an immortalized ego, forgetting that the ego as you know it is only a small portion of the self; so this section of the personality is simply projected onward, ad infinitum, so to speak. Because the dimensions of your reality are so little understood, your concepts are bound to be limited. In considering "immortality," mankind seems to hope for further egotistical development, and yet he objects to the idea that such development might involve change. He says through his religions that he has a soul indeed, without even asking what a soul is, and often he seems to regard it, again, as an object in his possession.

Now personality, even as you know it, constantly changes, and not always in ways that are anticipated - most often, in fact, in unpredictable ways. You insist upon focusing your attention upon the similarities that are woven through your own behavior; and upon these you build a theory that the self follows a pattern that you, instead, have transposed upon it. And the transposed pattern prevents you from seeing the self as it really is. Therefore, you also project this distorted viewpoint upon your conception of the reality of the soul. You think of the soul, therefore, in the light of erroneous conceptions that you hold regarding even the nature of your mortal selves.

Even the mortal self, you see, is far more miraculous and wondrous than you perceive, and possesses far more abilities than you ascribe to it. You do not understand as yet the true nature of perception, even as far as the mortal self is concerned, and therefore you can hardly understand the perceptions of the soul. For the soul, above all, perceives and creates. Remember again that you are a soul now. The soul within you, therefore, is now perceiving. Its methods of perception are the same now as they were before your physical birth, and as they will be after your physical death. So basically the inner portion of you, the soul-stuff, will not suddenly change its methods of perception nor its characteristics after physical death.

You can find out what the soul is now, therefore. It is not something waiting for you at your death, nor is it something you must save or redeem, and it is also something that you cannot lose. The term, "to lose or save your soul", has been grossly misinterpreted and distorted, for it is the part of you that is indeed indestructible. We will go into this particular matter in a portion of the book dealing with religion and the god concept.

Your own personality as you know it, that portion of you that you consider most precious, most uniquely you, will also never be destroyed or lost. It is a portion of the soul. It will not be gobbled by the soul, nor erased by it, nor subjugated by it; nor on the other hand can it ever be separated. It is, nevertheless, only one aspect of your soul. Your individuality, in whatever way you want to think of it, continues to exist in your terms.

It continues to grow and develop, but its growth and development is highly dependent upon its realization that while it is distinct and individual, it is also but one manifestation of the soul. To the extent that it realizes this, it learns to unfold in creativity, and to use those abilities that lie inherent within it.

Now unfortunately, it would be much easier simply to tell you that your individuality continues to exist, and let it go at that. While this would make a fairly reasonable parable, it has been told in that particular way before, and there are dangers in the very simplicity of the tale. The truth is that the personality you are now and the personality that you have been and will be - in the terms in which you understand time - all of these personalities are manifestations of the soul, of your soul.

Your soul therefore - the soul that you are - the soul that you are part of - that soul is a far more creative and miraculous phenomenon than you previously supposed. And when this is not clearly understood, and when the concept is watered down for simplicity's sake, as mentioned earlier, then the intense vitality of the soul can never be understood. Your soul, therefore, possesses the wisdom, information, and knowledge that is part of the experience of all these other personalities; and you have within yourselves access to this information, but only if you realize the true nature of your reality. Let me emphasize again that these personalities exist independently within and are a part of the soul, and each of them are free to create and develop.

There is however an inner communication, and the knowledge of one is available to any - not after physical death, but now in your present moment. Now the soul itself, as mentioned earlier, is not static. It grows and develops even through the experience of those personalities that compose it, and it is, to put it as simply as possible, more than the sum of its parts.

Now, there are no closed systems in reality. In your physical system the nature of your perceptions limits your idea of reality to some extent, because you purposely decide to focus within a given "locale." But basically speaking, consciousness can never be a closed system, and all barriers of such a nature are illusion. Therefore the soul itself is not a closed system. When you consider the soul, however, you usually think of it in such a light - unchanging, a psychic or spiritual citadel. But citadels not only keep out invaders, they also prevent expansion and development.

There are many matters here very difficult to express in words, for you are so afraid for your sense of identity that you resist the idea that the soul, for example, is an open spiritual system, a powerhouse of creativity that shoots out in all directions - and yet this is indeed the case.

I tell you this, and at the same time remind you that your present personality is never lost. Now another word for the soul is entity. You see it is not a simple matter of giving you a definition of a soul or entity, for even to have a glimpse in logical terms you would have to understand it in spiritual, psychic, and electromagnetic terms, and understand the basic nature of consciousness and action as well. But you can intuitively discover the nature of the soul or entity, and in many ways intuitive knowledge is superior to any other kind.

One prerequisite for such an intuitive understanding of the soul is the desire to achieve it. If the desire is strong enough, then you will be automatically led to experiences that will result in vivid, unmistakable subjective knowledge. There are methods that will enable you to do this, and I will give you some toward the end of this book.

For now, here is one quite effective but simple exercise. Close your eyes after having read this chapter to this point, and try to sense within yourself the source of power from which your own breathing and life forces come. Some of you will do this successfully at your first try. Others may take longer. When you feel within yourself this source, then try to sense this power flow outward through your entire physical being, through the fingertips and toes, through the pores of your body, all directions, with yourself as center. Imagine the rays undiminished, reaching then through the foliage and clouds above, through the center of the earth below, extending even to the farthest reaches of the universe.

Now I do not mean this to be merely a symbolic exercise, for though it may begin with imagination, it is based upon fact, and emanations from your consciousness and the creativity of your soul do indeed reach outward in that manner. The exercise will give you some idea of the true nature, creativity, and vitality of the soul from which you can draw your own energy and of which you are an individual and unique portion.

This discussion is not meant to be an esoteric presentation with little practical meaning in your daily lives. The fact is that while you hold limited concepts of your own reality, then you cannot practically take advantage of many abilities that are your own; and while you have a limited concept of the soul, then to some extent you cut yourself off from the source of your own being and creativity.

Now these abilities operate whether you know it or not, but often they operate in spite of you rather than with your conscious cooperation; and often when you do find yourself using them, you become frightened, disoriented, or confused. No matter what you have been taught, you must understand, for example, that basically speaking, per-ceptions are not physical in the way the term is usually used. If you catch yourself perceiving information through other than your physical senses, then you must accept the fact that this is the way perception works.

What often happens is that your conception of reality is so limited that you take fright whenever you perceive any experience that does not fit into your conception. Now I am not speaking merely of abilities loosely called "extrasensory perception." These experiences seem extraordinary to you only because you have for so long denied the existence of any perception that did not come through the physical senses.

So-called extrasensory perception gives you but a crude and distorted idea of the basic ways in which the inner self receives information, but the concepts built around extrasensory perception are at least nearer the truth, and as such represent an improvement over the idea that all perception is basically physical.

Now it is nearly impossible to separate a discussion of the nature of the soul from a discussion of the nature of perception. Very briefly let us review a few points: You form physical matter and the physical world that you know. The physical senses actually can be said to create the physical world, in that they force you to perceive an available field of energy in physical terms, and impose a highly specialized pattern upon this field of reality. Using the physical senses, you can perceive reality in no other way.

This physical perception in no way alters the native, basic, unfettered perception that is characteristic of the inner self, the inner self being the portion of the soul that is within you. The inner self knows its relationship with the soul. It is a portion of the self that acts, you might say, as a messenger between the soul and the present personality. You must also realize that while I use terms like "soul" or "entity," "inner self," and "present personality," I do so only for the sake of convenience, for one is a part of the other; there is no point where one begins and another ends.

You can see this easily for yourself if you consider the way in which psychologists use the terms "ego," "subconscious," and even "unconscious." What seems subconscious in one instant may be conscious the next. An unconscious motive may also be conscious at one point. Even in these terms your experience should tell you that the words themselves make divisions that do not exist in your own experience.

You seem to perceive exclusively through your physical senses, and yet you have only to extend your egotistical idea of reality, and you will find even your egotistical self accepting quite readily the existence of nonphysical information.

As it does, so its own ideas of its own nature will automatically change and expand, for you will have removed limitations to its growth. Now any act of perception changes the perceiver, and so the soul, considered as a perceiver, must also change. There are no real divisions between the perceiver and the thing seemingly perceived. In many ways the thing perceived is an extension of the perceiver. This may seem strange, but all acts are mental, or if you prefer, psychic acts. This is an extremely simple explanation; but the thought creates the reality. Then the creator of the thought perceives the object, and he does not understand the connection between him and this seemingly separate thing.

This characteristic of materializing thoughts and emotions into physical realities is an attribute of the soul. Now in your reality, these thoughts are made physical. In other realities, they may be "constructed" in an entirely different fashion. So your soul, that which you are, constructs your physical daily reality for you from the nature of your .thoughts and expectations.

You can readily see, therefore, how important your subjective feelings really are. This knowledge - that your universe is idea construction - can immediately give you clues that enable you to change your environment and circumstances beneficially. When you do not understand the nature of the soul, and do not realize that your thoughts and feelings form physical reality, then you feel powerless to change it. In later chapters of this book, I hope to give you some practical information that will enable you to alter practically the very nature and structure of daily life.

The soul perceives all experience directly. Most experiences of which you are aware come packaged in physical wrapping, and you take the wrapping for the experience itself, and do not think of looking inside. The world that you know is one of the infinite materializations taken by consciousness, and as such it is valid.

The soul, however, does not need to follow the laws and principles that are a part of the physical reality, and it does not depend upon physical perception. The soul's perceptions are of acts and events that are mental, that lie, so to speak, beneath physical events as you know them. The soul's perceptions are not dependent upon time, because time is a physical camouflage and does not apply to nonphysical reality.

Now it is difficult to explain to you how direct experience actually works, for it exists - a total field of perception, innocent of the physical clues such as color, size, weight, and sense, with which your physical perceptions are clothed.

Words are used to tell of an experience, but they obviously are not the experience that they attempt to describe. Your physical subjective experience is so involved with word thinking, however, that it is almost impossible for you to conceive of an experience that is not thought-word oriented.

Now, each event of which you are aware is already a translation of an inner event, a psychic or mental event that is perceived by the soul directly, but translated by the physically oriented portions of the self into physical sense terms.

It goes without saying then that the soul does not require a physical body for purposes of perception; that perception is not dependent upon physical senses; that experience continues whether or not you are in this life or another; and also that the soul's basic methods of perception are also operating within you now even as you read this book. It also follows that your experience within the physical system is dependent upon a physical form and physical senses - again, because these interpret reality and translate it into physical data. It also follows that some hints of the soul's direct experience can be gained by momentarily switching the physical senses off - by refusing to use them as perceptors, and falling back upon other methods. Now you do this to some extent in the dream state, but even then in many dreams you still tend to translate experience into hallucinatory physical terms. Most of the dreams that you recall are of this nature.

At certain depths of sleep, however, the soul's perception operates relatively unhampered. You drink, so to speak, from the pure well of perception. You communicate with the depths of your own being, and the source of your creativity. These experiences, not being translated physically, do not remain in the morning. You do not remember them as dreams. Dreams, however, may later the same evening be formed from the information gained during what I will call the "depth experience." These will not be exact or near translations of the experience, but rather of the nature of dream parables - an entirely different thing, you see.

Now this particular level of consciousness, occurring in the sleep state, has not been pinpointed by your scientists. During it, energy is generated that makes the dream state itself possible. It is true that dreams allow the physically oriented self to digest current experience, but it is also true that the experience is then returned to its initial components. It breaks apart, so to speak. Portions of it are retained as "past" physical sense data, but the whole experience returns to its initial direct state.

It exists then, "eternally," separated from the physical clothing that you need in order to understand it. Physical existence is one way in which the soul chooses to experience its own actuality. The soul, in other words, has created a world for you to inhabit, to change - a complete sphere of activity in which new developments and indeed new forms of consciousness can emerge.

In a manner of speaking, you continually create your soul as it continually creates you.

Now, the soul is never diminished, nor basically are any portions of the self.

The soul can be considered as an electromagnetic energy field, of which you are part. It is a field of concentrated action when you consider it in this light - a powerhouse of probabilities or probable actions, seeking to be expressed; a grouping of nonphysical consciousnesses that nevertheless knows itself as an identity. Look at it this way: The young woman through whom I speak once stated in a poem, and I quote: "These atoms speak, and call themselves my name."

Now your physical body is a field of energy with a certain form, however, and when someone asks you your name, your lips speak it - and yet the name does not belong to the atoms and molecules in the lips that utter the syllables. The name has meaning only to you. Within your body you cannot put your finger upon your own identity. If you could travel within your body, you could not find where your identity resides, yet you say, "This is my body," and, "This is my name."

If you cannot be found, even by yourself, within your body, then where is this identity of yours that claims to hold the cells and organs as its own? Your identity obviously has some connection with your body, since you have no trouble distinguishing your body from someone else's, and you certainly have no trouble distinguishing between your body and the chair, say, upon which you may sit.

In a larger manner, the identity of the soul can be seen from the same viewpoint. It knows who it is, and is far more certain of its identity, indeed, than your physical self is of its identity. And yet now where in this electromagnetic energy field can the identity of the soul as such be found?

It regenerates all other portions of itself, and gives you the identity that is your own. And when it should be asked, "Who are you?" it would simply answer, "I am I," and be answering for you also.

Now in terms of psychology as you understand it, the soul could be considered as a prime identity that is in itself a gestalt of many other individual consciousnesses - an unlimited self that is yet able to express itself in many ways and forms and yet maintain its own identity, its own "I am-ness," even while it is aware that its I am-ness may be part of another I am-ness. Now I am sure it may seem inconceivable to you, but the fact is that this I am-ness is retained even though it may, figuratively speaking, now merge with and travel through other such energy fields. There is, in other words, a give and take between souls or entities, and no end of possibilities, both of development and expansion. Again, the soul is not a closed system.

It is only because your present existence is so highly focused in one narrow area that you put such stern limits upon your definitions and the self, and then project these upon your concepts of the soul. You worry for your physical identity and limit the extent of your perceptions for fear you cannot handle more and retain your selfhood.

The soul is not frightened for its identity. It is sure of itself. It ever seeks. It is not afraid of being overwhelmed by experience or perception. If you had a more thorough understanding of the nature of identity you would not, for example, fear telepathy, for behind this concern is the worry that your identity will be swept away by the suggestions or thoughts of others.

No psychological system is closed, no consciousness is closed, regardless of any appearances to the contrary within your own system. The soul is a traveler, as has been said so often; but it is also the creator of all experience, and of all destinations in your terms. It creates worlds as it goes, so to speak.

Now this is the true nature of the psychological being of which you are part. As mentioned earlier, later in the book I will give you some practical suggestions that will allow you to recognize some of your own deeper abilities, and utilize them for your own development, pleasure, and education.

Consciousness is not basically built upon those precepts of good and evil that so presently concern you. By inference, neither is a soul. This does not mean that in your system, and in some others, these problems do not exist and that good is not preferable to the evil. It simply means that the soul knows that good and evil are but different manifestations of a far greater reality.

I want to emphasize again that while all this sounds difficult in the telling, it becomes much more clear intuitively when you learn to experience what you are, for if you cannot travel inside your physical body to find your identity, you can travel through your psychological self.

There are far more wonders to perceive through this inward exploration than you can possibly believe until you begin such a journey for yourself. You are a soul; you are a particular manifestation of a soul, and it is sheer nonsense to think that you must remain ignorant of the nature of your own being. You may not be able to put your knowledge clearly into words, but this will in no way negate the value or the validity of the experience that will be yours once you begin to look inward.

Now you may call this a spiritual or psychological or psychic exploration, as you prefer. You will not be trying to find your soul. In that respect there is nothing to find. It is not lost, and you are not lost. The words you use may make no difference, but your intent does indeed.

CHAPTER 7

THE POTENTIALS OF THE SOUL

It seems to you that you have only one form, the physical one that you perceive, and no other. It also seems that your form can only be in one place at one time. You have indeed other forms that you do not perceive, and you also create various kinds of forms for various purposes, although you do not perceive these physically either.

Your main sense of identity is involved with your physical body, so that it is, for example, extremely difficult for you to imagine yourself without it, or outside it, or in any way disconnected from it. Form is the result of concentrated energy, the pattern for it caused by vividly directed emotional or psychic idea images. The intensity is all important. If you have, for example, a highly vivid desire to be somewhere else, then without realizing it consciously a pseudophysical form, identical with your own, may appear in that very spot. The desire will carry the imprint of your personality and image, even though you remain unaware of the image or its appearance in the other location.

Though this thought image usually is not seen by others, it is quite possible that in the future scientific instruments may perceive it. As it is, such an image may be perceived by those who have developed use of the inner senses. Any intense mental act - thought or emotion - will not only be constructed in some physical or pseudophysical manner, but will also bear to some extent the imprint of the personality who originally conceived it.

There are many such incipient or latent forms. To help you imagine what I am speaking of, you might think of them as ghost images, or shadow images, though this is only for the sake of analogy - forms, for example, just beneath, that have not emerged completely into physical reality as you know it, but are nevertheless vivid enough to be constructed. You would think them quite real indeed, if you could see them.

Each individual actually sends such replica images of himself out frequently, though the degree of the materialization may differ, some forms, for example, being more or less shadowy than others. However, these forms are not mere projections - "flat" images. They have a definite effect upon the atmosphere. They "make room" for themselves in ways that are rather difficult to explain, although they may coexist at times with physical objects or shapes, or may even be superimposed upon these. In this case there is a definite interaction - an interchange that is, again, beneath physical perception.

You may suddenly strongly wish that you were standing by a beloved but distant, familiar seashore, for example. This intense desire would then act something like a core of energy projected outward from your own mind, given a form, your form. The place that you had envisioned would then attract the form, and it would instantaneously stand there. This happens with great frequency.

It would not be seen under usual circumstances. On the other hand, if the desire were still more intense, the energy core would be greater, and a portion of your own flow of consciousness would be imparted to the form, so that for a moment you in your room might suddenly smell the salt air, or in some other way perceive the environment in which this pseudoimage stands.

The extent of perception will vary here to a great degree. To begin with, your physical form is the result of great emotional focus. The fantastic energy of your psyche not only created your physical body, but maintains it. It is not one continuous thing, although to you it seems permanent enough while it lasts. It is nevertheless in a constant state of pulsation, and because of the nature of energy and its construction, the body is actually blinking off and on.

This is difficult to explain, and for our present purposes it is not entirely necessary that you understand the reasons for this pulsing; but even physically, you are "not here" as often as you are. Your emotional intensity and focus create forms beside your physical body, however their duration and degree are dependent upon the intensity of any given emotional origin.

Your space is therefore filled with incipient forms, quite vivid, but beneath the regular structure of matter that you perceive.

These projections, then, actually are sent out constantly. Some more sophisticated scientific instruments than you now have would clearly show not only the existence of these forms, but also vibrations in varying waves of intensity surrounding those physical objects that you do perceive.

To make this clearer, look at any table in the room before you. It is physical, solid, and you perceive it easily. Now for an analogy, imagine if you can that behind the table is another just like it, but not quite as physical, and behind that one another, and another behind that each one more difficult to perceive, fading into invisibility. And in front of the table is a table just like it, only a bit less physical appearing than the "real" table - it also having a succession of even less physical tables extending outward. And the same for each side of the table.

Now anything that appears in physical terms also exists in other terms that you do not perceive. You only perceive realities when they achieve a certain "pitch," when they seem to coalesce into matter. But they actually exist, and quite validly at other levels.

There are also realities, that are "relatively more valid" than your own; in comparison, strictly for an analogy, for example, your physical table would appear as shadowy in contrast, as [like] those very shadowy tables we imagine. You would have a sort of "supertable" in those terms. Yours is not a system of reality formed by the most intense concentration of energy, therefore. It is simply the one you are turned into, part and parcel of. You perceive it simply for this reason.

Other portions of yourself, therefore, of which you are not consciously aware, do inhabit what you could call a supersystem of reality in which consciousness learns to handle and perceive much stronger concentrations of energy, and to construct "forms" of a different nature indeed.

Your idea of space is then highly distorted, since space to you is simply where nothing is perceived. It is obviously filled with all kinds of phenomena, that make no impression at all upon your perceptive mechanisms. Now in various ways and on occasion, you can tune into these other realities to some degree - and you do so spasmodically, though in many cases the experience is lost because it does not register physically.

Think again about this form that you sent to the oceanside. Though it was not equipped with your own physical senses, it was of itself to some extent able to perceive. You projected it unknowingly, but through quite natural laws. The form built up from intense emotional desire. The image then follows its own laws of reality, and to some extent, and to a lesser degree than you, has a consciousness.

You are, using an analogy again, sent out by a superself who strongly desired existence in physical form. You are no puppet of this superself. You will follow your own lines of development, and through means far too difficult to explain here, you add to the experience of the superself and also then extend the nature of its reality. You also insure your own development, and you are able to draw upon the abilities of the superself.

Nor will you ever be swallowed by the self that in these terms seems so superior. Because you exist, you send out like projections of your own,as mentioned earlier. There is no end to the reality of consciousness, nor the means of its materialization. Nor is there any end to the developments possible for each identity.

Let me make it clear once again: Your present personality as you think of it is indeed "indelible," and continues after death to grow and develop.

I mention this again in the middle of our present discussion so that you do not feel lost, or negated, or insignificant. There are obviously an infinite number of gradations in the types and kinds of forms of which we have been speaking. That energy which is projected from our "superself," that spark of intense identity that resulted in your physical birth, that unique impetus, in the one way has many similarities to the old concept of the soul - except that it contains only a part of the story.

While you continue to exist and develop as an individual, your whole self, or soul, has such vast potential, that it can never be expressed fully through one personality, as somewhat explained in one previous chapter.

Now, through very intense emotional focus you can create a form, and project it to another person who may then perceive it. This may be done consciously or unconsciously; and that is rather important. This discussion does not concern the so-called astral form, which is something entirely different. The physical body is the materialization of the astral form.

It does not desert the body for any length of time, however, and it is not this that is projected in cases like the seaside analogy used earlier. You are presently focused not only in your physical body, but thin a particular frequency of events that you interpret as time. Other historical periods exist simultaneously, in forms quite as valid; and other reincarnational selves. Again, you simply are not tuned to those frequencies.

You can know what happened in the past and have histories, because according to the rules of the game that you accepted, you believe that the past, but not the future, can be perceived. You could have histories of the future in the present, if the rules of the game were different.

In other levels of reality, the rules of the game change. After death in your terms, you are quite free perceptively. The future appears as clearly as the past. Even this is highly complicated, however, for there is not just one past. You accept as real only certain classifications of events and ignore others. We have mentioned events. There are also probable pasts therefore, that exist quite outside your comprehension. You choose one particular group of these, and latch upon this group of events as the only ones possible, not realizing that you have selected from an infinite variety of past events.

There are then, obviously, probable futures and probable presents. I am trying to discuss this in your terms, since basically, you must understand, the words ,.past," "present," and "future" are no more meaningful as far as true experience is concerned than are the words "ego," "conscious," or "unconscious."

Not only are you part of other independent selves, each one focused in its own reality, but there is a sympathetic relationship that exists. For example, because of this relationship, your experience need not be limited by the physical perceptive mechanisms. You can draw upon knowledge that belongs to these other independent selves. You can learn to focus your attention away from physical reality, to learn new methods of perception that will enable you to enlarge your concept of reality and greatly expand your own experience.

It is only because you believe that physical existence is the only valid one, that it does not occur to you to look for other realities. Such things as telepathy and clairvoyance can give you hints of other kinds of perception, but you are also involved in quite definite experiences both while you are normally waking and while you are asleep.

The so-called stream of consciousness is simply that - one small stream of thoughts, images, and impressions - that is part of a much deeper river of consciousness that represents your own far greater existence and experience. You spend all your time examining this one small stream, so that you become hypnotized by its flow, and entranced by its motion. Simultaneously these other streams of perception and con-sciousness go by without your notice, yet they are very much a part of you, and they represent quite valid aspects, events, actions, emotions with which you are also involved in other layers of reality.

You are as actively and vividly concerned in these realities as you are in the one in which your main attention is now focused. Now, as you are merely concerned with your physical body and physical self as a rule, you give your attention to the stream of consciousness that seems to deal with it. These other streams of consciousness, however, are connected with other self-forms that you do not perceive. The body, in other words, is simply one manifestation of what you are in one reality, but in these other realities you have other forms.

"You" are not divorced from these other streams of consciousness in any basic way; only your focus of attention closes you off from them, and from the events in which they are involved. If you think of your stream of consciousness as transparent, however, then you can learn to look through and beneath it to others that lie in other beds of reality. You can also learn to rise above your present stream of consciousness and perceive others that run, for analogy's sake, parallel. The point is that you are only limited to the self you know if you think that you are, and if you do not realize that that self is far from your entire identity.

Now often you tune into these other streams of consciousness without realizing that you have done so - for again, they are a part of the same river of your identity. All are therefore connected.

Any creative work involves you in a cooperative process in which you learn to dip into these other streams of consciousness, and come up with a perception that has far more dimensions than one arising from the one narrow, usual stream of consciousness that you know. Great creativity is then multidimensional for this reason. Its origin is not from one reality, but from many, and it is tinged with the multiplicity of that origin.

Great creativity always seems greater than its pure physical dimension and reality. By contrast with the so-called usual, it appears almost as an intrusion. It takes the breath away. Such creativity automatically reminds each man of his own multidimensional reality. The words "know thyself," therefore, mean far more than most people ever suppose.

Now in moments of solitude you may become aware of some of these other streams of consciousness. You may at times for example, hear words, or see images that appear out of context with your own thoughts. According to your education, beliefs, and background you may interpret these in any number of ways. For that matter, they may originate from several sources. On many occasions, however, you have inadvertently tuned in on one of your other streams of consciousness, opened momentarily a channel to those other levels of reality in which other portions of you dwell.

Some of these may involve the thoughts of what you would call a reincarnational self, focused in another period of history as you know it. You may instead, "pick up" an event in which a probable self is involved, according to your inclination, your psychic suppleness, your curiosity, your desire for knowledge. In other words, you may become aware of a far greater reality than you now know, use abilities that you do not realize you possess, know beyond all doubt that your own consciousness and identity is independent of the world in which you now focus your primary attention. If all of that were not true, I would not be writing this book and you would not be reading it.

These other existences of yours go on quite merrily whether you are waking or sleeping, but while you are awake ordinarily you block them out. In the dream state you are much more aware of them, although there is a final process of dreaming that often masks intense psychological and psychic experience, and unfortunately what you usu- ally recall is this final dream version.

In this final version the basic experience is converted as nearly as possible into physical terms. It is therefore distorted. This final touching-up process is not done by deeper layers of the self however, but is much more nearly a conscious process than you realize.

One small point might explain what I mean here. If you do not want to remember a particular dream, you yourself censor the memory on levels quite close to consciousness. Often you can even catch yourself in the act of purposely dropping the memory of a dream. The touching-up process occurs almost at this same level, though not quite.

Here the basic experience is hastily dressed up as much as possible in physical clothes. This is not because you want to understand the experience, but because you refuse to accept it as basically nonphysical. All dreams are not of this nature. Some dreams themselves do take place in psychic or mental areas connected with your daily activities, in which case no dressing-up process is necessary. But in the very deep reaches of sleep experience - those, incidentally, not yet touched upon by scientists in so-called dream laboratories - you are in communication with other portions of your own identity, and with the other realities in which they exist.

In this state you also pursue works and endeavors that may or may not be connected with your interests as you know of them. You are learning, studying, playing; you are anything but asleep as you think of the term. You are highly active. You are involved in the underground work, in the real nitty-gritty of existence.

Now let me emphasize here that you are simply not unconscious. It only seems that you are, because as a rule you remember none of this in the morning. To some extent, however, some people are aware of these activities, and there are also methods that will enable you to recall them to some degree.

I do not want to minimize the importance of your state of consciousness; as, for example, you read this book. Presumably you are awake, but in many ways when you are awake, you are resting far more than you are in your so-called unconscious nightly state. Then to a larger extent you realize your own reality, and are free to use abilities that in the daytime you ignore or deny.

At a very simple level, for example, your consciousness leaves your body often in the sleep state. You communicate with people in other levels of reality that you have known, but far beyond this, you creatively maintain and revitalize your physical image. You process daily experience, project it into what you think of as the future, choose from an infinity of probable events those you will make physical, and begin the mental and psychic processes that will bring them into the world of substance.

At the same time, you make this information available to all these other portions of your identity, who dwell in entirely different realities, and you receive from them comparable information. You do not lose contact with your ordinary waking self. You simply do not focus upon it. You turn your attention away. In the daytime you simply reverse the process. If you were looking at your daily normal self from the other view-point, you see, using an analogy here, you might find that physically waking self as strange as you now find the sleeping self. The analogy will not hold however, simply because this sleeping self of yours is far more knowledgeable than the waking self of which you are so proud.

The seeming division is not arbitrary, or forced upon you. It is simply caused by your present stage of development, and it does vary. Many people take excursions into other realities - swim, so to speak, through other streams of consciousness as a part of their normal waking lives. Sometimes strange fish pop up in those waters!

Now I am obviously such a one in your terms, swimming up through other dimensions of reality and observing a dimension of existence that is yours rather than my own. There are, therefore, channels that exist between all these streams of consciousness, all these symbolic rivers of psychological and psychic experience, and there are journeys that can be made from my dimension as well as yours.

Now initially Ruburt and Joseph and I were a part of the same entity, or overall identity, and so symbolically speaking, there are psychic currents that unite us. All of these merge into what has often been compared to as an ocean of consciousness, a well from which all actuality springs. Start with any one consciousness, and theoretically you will find all others.

Now often the ego acts as a dam, to hold back other perceptions - not because it was meant to, or because it is in the nature of an ego to behave in such a fashion, or even because it is a main function of an ego, but simply because you have been taught that the purpose of an ego is restrictive rather than expanding. You actually imagine that the ego is a very weak portion of the self, that it must defend itself against other areas of the self that are far stronger and more persuasive and indeed more dangerous; and so you have trained it to wear blinders, and quite against its natural inclinations.

The ego does want to understand and interpret physical reality, and to relate to it. It wants to help you survive within physical existence, but by putting blinders upon it, you hamper its perception and native flexibility. Then because it is inflexible you say that this is the natural function and characteristic of the ego.

It cannot relate to a reality that you will not allow it to perceive. It can poorly help you to survive when you do not allow it to use its abilities to discover those true conditions in which it must manipulate. You put blinders upon it, and then say that it cannot see.

CHAPTER 8

SLEEP, DREAMS, AND CONSCIOUSNESS

Persons vary in the amount of sleep they need, and no pill will ever allow them to dispense with sleep entirely, for too much work is done in that state. However, this could be done far more effectively with two, rather than one, sleep periods of lesser duration.

Two periods of three hours apiece would be quite sufficient for most people, if the proper suggestions were given before sleep - suggestions that would insure the body's complete recuperation. In many cases ten hours sleep, for example, is actually disadvantageous, resulting in a sluggishness both of mind and body. In this case the spirit has simply been away from the body for too long a time, resulting in a loss of muscular flexibility.

As many light snacks would actually be much better than three large meals a day, so short naps rather than such an extended period would also be more effective. There would be other benefits. The conscious self would recall more of its dream adventures as a matter of course, and gradually these would be added to the totality of experience as the ego thinks of it.

As a result of more frequent, briefer sleep periods, there would also be higher peaks of conscious focus, and a more steady renewal of both physical and psychic activity. There would not be such a definite division between the various areas or levels of the self. A more economical use of energy would result, and also a more effective use of nutrients. Consciousness as you know it would also become more flexible and mobile.

This would not lead to a blurring of consciousness or focus. Instead the greater flexibility would result in a perfection of conscious focus. The seeming great division between the waking and the sleeping self is largely a result of the division in function, the two being largely separated - a block of time being allotted to the one, and a larger block of time to the other. They are kept apart, then, because of your use of time.

Initially, your conscious life followed the light of day. Now with artificial light this need not be the case. There are opportunities here, then, to be gained from your technology that you are not presently taking advantage of. To sleep all day and work all night is hardly the answer; it is simply the inversion of your present habits. But it would be far more effective and efficient to divide the twenty-four-hour period in a different way.

There are many variations, in fact, that would be better than your present system. Ideally, sleeping five hours at a time, you gain the maximum benefit, and anything else over this time is not nearly as helpful. Those who require more sleep would then take, say, a two-hour nap. For others a four-hour block sleep session and two naps would be highly beneficial. With suggestion properly given, the body can recuperate in half the time now given to sleep. In any case it is much more bracing and efficient to have the physical body active rather than inactive for, say, eight to ten hours.

You have trained your consciousness to follow certain patterns that are not necessarily natural for it, and these patterns increase the sense of alienation between the waking and dreaming self. To some extent you drug the body with suggestion, so that it believes it must sleep away a certain amount of hours in one block. Animals sleep when they are tired, and awaken in a much more natural fashion.

You would retain a far greater memory of your subjective experiences, and your body would be healthier, if these sleeping patterns were changed. Six to eight hours of sleep in all would be sufficient with the nap patterns outlined. And even those who think they now need more sleep than this would find that they did not, if all the time was not spent in one block. The entire system, physical, mental, and psychic, would benefit.

The divisions between the self would not be nearly as severe. Physical and mental work would be easier, and the body itself would gain steady periods of refreshment and rest. Now, as a rule, it must wait, regardless of its condition, at least for some sixteen hours. For other reasons having to do with the chemical reactions during the dream state, bodily health would be improved; and this particular schedule would also be of help in schizophrenia, and generally aid persons with problems of depression, or those with mental instability.

Your sense of time would also be less rigorous and rigid. Creative abilities would be quickened, and the great problem of insomnia that exists for many people would be largely conquered - for what they fear is often the long period of time in which consciousness, as they think of it, seems to be extinguished.

Small meals or snacks would then be taken upon rising. This method of eating and sleeping would greatly help various metabolic difficulties, and also aid in the development of spiritual and psychic ability. For many reasons, physical activity at night has a different effect upon the body than physical activity during the day, and ideally, both effects are necessary.

At certain times during the night the negative ions in the air are much stronger, or numerous, than in the daytime, for example; and activity during this time, particularly a walk or outside activity, would be highly beneficial from a health standpoint.

Now the period just before dawn often represents a crisis point for persons severely ill. Consciousness has been away from the body for too long a period, and such a returning consciousness then has difficulty dealing with the sick body mechanism. The practice in hospitals of giving drugs to patients so that they will sleep entirely throughout the night is detrimental for this reason. In many cases it is too great a strain on the part of the returning consciousness to take over again the ailing mechanism.

Such medications also often prevent certain necessary dream cycle that can help the body recuperate, and the consciousness then becomes highly disoriented. Some of the divisions between different portions of the self, therefore, are not basically necessary but are the result of custom and convenience.

In earlier periods of time, even though there were no electric lights for example, sleep was not long and continuous at night, for sleeping quarters were not as secure. The caveman, for example, while sleeping was on the alert for predators. The mysterious aspects of the natural night in outside surroundings kept him partially alert. He awakened often, and surveyed the nearby land and his own place of shelter.

He did not sleep in long blocks as you do. His sleeping periods were instead for two or three hours, stretched through the nighttime from dusk to dawn, but alternated by periods of high wakefulness and alert activity. He also crept out to seek food when he hoped his predators were sleeping.

This resulted in a mobility of consciousness that indeed insured his physical survival, and those intuitions that appeared to him in the dream state were remembered and taken advantage of in the waking state.

Now, many diseases are simply caused by this division of yours and this long period of bodily inactivity, and this extended focus of attention in either waking or dreaming reality. Your normal consciousness can benefit by excursions and rest in those other fields of actuality that are entered when you sleep, and the so-called sleeping consciousness will also benefit by frequent excursions into the waking state.

I bring up these matters here because such changes in habitual patterns would definitely result in greater understanding of the nature of the self. The inner dreaming portions of the personality seem strange to you not only because of a basic difference of focus, but because you clearly devote opposite portions of a twenty-four hour cycle to these areas of the self.

You separate them as much as possible. In doing so you divide your intuitive, creative, and psychic abilities quite neatly from your physical, manipulative, objective abilities. It makes no difference how many hours of sleep you think you need. You would be much better off sleeping in several shorter periods, and you would actually then require less time. The largest sleep unit should be at night. But again, the efficiency of sleep is lessened and disadvantages set in after six to eight hours of phys-ical inactivity.

The functions of hormones and chemicals, and of adrenal processes in particular, would function with far greater effectiveness with these alternating periods of activities as I have mentioned. The wear and tear upon the body would be minimized, while at the same time all regenerative powers would be used to the maximum. Both those with a high and low metabolism would benefit.

The psychic centers would be activated more frequently, and the entire identity of the personality would be better strengthened and maintained. The resulting mobility and flexibility of consciousness would cause an added dividend in increased conscious concentration, and fatigue levels would always remain below danger points. A greater equalization, both physical and mental, would result.

Now such schedules could be adopted quite easily. Those who work the American working hours, for example, could sleep between four to six hours an evening, according to individual variations, and nap after supper. I want to make it plain, however, that anything over a six- to eight hour continuous sleeping period works against you, and a ten-hour period for example can be quite disadvantageous. On awakening often then you do not feel rested, but drained of energy. You have not been minding the store.

If you do not understand that in periods of sleep your consciousness actual does leave your body, then what I have said will be meaningless. Now your consciousness does return at times, to check upon the physical mechanisms, and the simple consciousness of atom and cell the body consciousness - is always with the body, so it is not vacant. But the largely creative portions of the self do leave the body, and for large periods of time when you sleep.

Some cases of strong neurotic behavior result from your present sleeping habits. Sleepwalking to some degree is also connected here. Consciousness wants to return to the body, but it has been hypnotized into the idea that the body must not awaken. Excess nervous energy takes over, and rouses the muscles to activity, because the body knows it has been inactive for too long and otherwise severe muscular cramps would result.

The same applies to your eating habits. By turn you overstuff and then starve the tissues. This has definite effects upon the nature of your consciousness, your creativity, your degree of concentration. Along these lines, for example, you do literally starve your bodies at night, and add to the aging of your bodies by denying them food throughout those long hours. All of this reflects upon the strength and nature of your con-sciousness.

Your food should be divided within the twenty-four hour period, and not just during the times of wakefulness - that is, if the sleep patterns were changed as I suggest, you would also be eating during some night hours. You would eat far less at any given "mealtime," however. Small amounts of food much more frequently taken would be much more beneficial than your present practice in physical, mental, and psychic terms.

Changing the sleep patterns would automatically change the eating patterns. You would find you were a much more united identity. You would become aware of your clairvoyant and telepathic abilities, for example, to a far greater degree, and you would not feel the deep separation that you now feel between the dreaming and waking self. To a large degree this sense of alienation would vanish.

Your enjoyment of nature would also increase, for as a rule you are largely unacquainted with the nighttime. You could take much better advantage of the intuitional knowledge that occurs in the dream state, and the cycle of your moods would not swing so definitely as it often does. You would feel much safer and more secure in all areas of existence.

The problems of senility would also be reduced, for stimuli would not be minimized for so long a time. And consciousness, with a greater flexibility, would know more of its own sense of joy.

It is well known that fluctuations of consciousness and alertness exist in the sleep state. Some periods of dream activity do indeed supersede those of some waking states. But there are also fluctuations in normal waking consciousness, rhythms of intense activity followed by a much less active period of consciousness.

Some waking states, of course, come very close to sleep states. These blend one into the other so that the rhythm often goes unnoticed. These gradations of consciousness are accompanied by changes in the physical organism. In the more sluggish periods of waking consciousness there is a lack of concentration, a cutting off of stimuli to varying degrees, an increase in accidents, and generally a lower body tone.

Because of your habits of an extended sleep period, followed by an extended waking period, you do not take advantage of these rhythms of consciousness. The high peaks are to some extent smothered, or even go unnoticed. The sharp contrasts and the high efficiency of the natural waking consciousness is barely utilized.

Now I am giving all of this material here because it will help you understand and use your present abilities. You are asking too much of normal waking consciousness, smoothing out the valleys and peaks of its activity, demanding in some cases that it go full blast ahead when it is actually at a minimal period, denying yourself the great mobility of consciousness that is possible.

The suggestions given earlier in this chapter, concerning sleeping habits, will result in a natural use of these rhythms. The peaks will be experienced more frequently. Concentration will be increased, problems seen more clearly, and learning capacities better utilized.

This extended period, given to waking consciousness without rest periods, builds up chemicals in the blood that are discharged in sleep. But in the meantime they make the body sluggish and retard conscious concentration. The long sleep period to which you are accustomed then does become necessary. A vicious circle then is formed. This forces overstimulations during the night, increasing the body's work, making it perform continuously over an extended time physical purifications that ideally would be taken care of in briefer periods of rest. The ego feels threatened by the extended "leave of absence" it must take, becomes wary of sleep, and sets up barriers against the dream state. Many of these are highly artificial.

A seeming duality is the result and a mistrust on one part of the self toward the other. Much creative material of quite practical value is lost in the process. The procedures mentioned would allow much greater access to such information, and the waking self would be more refreshed. The symbolism in dreams would appear with greater clarity, not, for example, be lost through the many hours you now give to sleep.

Muscular strength would benefit. The blood would be cleansed more effectively than when the body lies prone for such a time. Most of all, there would be far - if you will excuse me - better communication between the subjective layers of the self, an increased sense of security, and, particularly with children, an earlier kindling of creative abilities.

A clear, uncluttered, bright, and powerful consciousness needs frequent rest periods if its efficiency is to be maintained, and if it is to correctly interpret reality. Otherwise it distorts what is perceived.

Rest or sleep cures - very extended sleep periods - have been helpful for therapy in some cases, not because extended sleep is in itself beneficial, but because so many toxins had built up that such extended periods were required. Learning processes are definitely hampered through your present habits, for there are certain periods when consciousness is attuned to learning, and yet you try to force learning during unrecognized minimal periods. Creative and psychic abilities are thrust into the background simply because of this artificial division. Dualities result that affect all of your activities.

In some cases you literally force yourselves to sleep when your consciousness could be at one of its maximum points. This is, incidentally, in the predawn period. In certain afternoon hours consciousness is lowered, and needs refreshment that is instead denied.

If the stages of waking consciousness were examined as sleep stages are presently being examined, for example, you would find a much greater range of activity than is suspected. Certain transition stages are completely ignored. In many ways it can be said that consciousness does indeed flicker, and varies in intensities. It is not like a steady beam of light, for instance.

Consciousness has many characteristics, some of course known to you. Many of the characteristics of consciousness, however, are not so apparent, since presently you largely use your own consciousness in such a way that its perceptions appear in quite other than "natural" guises. You are aware of your own consciousness, in other words, through the medium of your own physical mechanism. You are not nearly as aware of your own consciousness when it is not operating primarily through the mediumship of the body, as it does in out-of-body states and some dissociated conditions.

The characteristics of consciousness are the same whether you are in a body or outside of one. The peaks and valleys of consciousness that I mentioned exist to some degree in all consciousness despite the form adopted after death. The nature of your consciousness is no different basically than it is now, though you may not be aware of many of its characteristics.

Now your consciousness is telepathic and clairvoyant, for example, even though you may not realize it. In sleep when you often presume yourself to be unconscious you may be far more conscious than you are now, but simply using abilities of consciousness that you do not accept as real or valid in waking life. You therefore shut them out of your conscious experience. Consciousness, yours and mine, is quite independent of both time and space. And after death you are simply aware of the greater powers of consciousness that exist within you all the time.

Since they do, of course, you can discover them now and learn to use them. This will directly assist you in after-death experience. You will not be nearly so startled by the nature of your own reactions if you understand beforehand for example that your consciousness not only is not imprisoned by your physical body, but can create other portions at will. Those who "overidentify" their consciousness with their body can suffer self-created torment for no reason, lingering about the body. Indeed, quite the forlorn soul, thinking it has no other place to go.

You are, as I said earlier, a spirit now; and that spirit has a consciousness. The consciousness belongs to the spirit then, but the two are not the same. The spirit may turn its consciousness off and on. By its nature consciousness may flicker and fluctuate, but the spirit does not.

I do not particularly like the word "spirit" because of several implications attached to it, but it suits our purposes in that the word does imply an independence from physical form.

Consciousness does not refresh itself in sleep. It is merely turned in another direction. Consciousness does not sleep then in those terms and while it may be turned off it is not like a light.

Turning it off does not extinguish it in the way that a light disappears when a switch is turned. Following the analogy, if consciousness were like a light that belonged to you, even when you switched it off, there would be a sort of twilight, but not darkness.

The spirit, therefore, is never in a state of nothingness, with its consciousness extinguished. It is very important therefore that such be realized.

Earlier I said that you are only familiar with those characteristics of your own consciousness that you use through the mediumship of the body. You rely upon the body to express the perceptions of your consciousness. You tend, again, to identify the expression of your consciousness with the body.

Yet consciousness can be allowed to retreat, and to some degree, begin to cut off its physical expression. You would not be aware consciously of this permission, simply because this kind of demonstration could not be held if the normal waking consciousness knew. It would automatically be frightened. As I spoke about the dimming of consciousness, Joseph then experienced it.

This can be an exercise, actually, in the manipulation of consciousness. Close to death, this same sort of thing happens in varying degrees when the consciousness realizes that it can no longer express itself through the mediumship of the body. If the dying person overidentifies with the body then he can easily panic, thinking that all expression is therefore cut off, and for that matter that his consciousness is about to be extinguished.

Such a belief in extinction, such a certainty that identity is about to be blotted out in the next moment, is a severe psychological experience, that in itself can bring about unfortunate reactions. What happens instead is that you find consciousness quite intact, and its expression far less limited than it was before.

We will be dealing now, after what I hope is suitable background material, with some chapters on the nature of existence after physical death, at the point of death, and involving the final physical death at the end of the reincarnational cycle. It is important that you understand something about the nature and behavior of your own con-sciousness before we begin.

CHAPTER 9

THE "DEATH" EXPERIENCE

SESSION 535, JUNE 17,1970,

What happens at the point of death? The question is much more easily asked than answered. Basically there is not any particular point of death in those terms, even in the case of a sudden accident. I will attempt to give you a practical answer to what you think of as this practical question, however. What the question really means to most people is this: What will happen when I am not alive in physical terms any longer? What will I feel? Will I still be myself? Will the emotions that propelled me in life continue to do so? Is there a heaven or a hell? Will I be greeted by gods or demons, enemies, or beloved ones? Most of all the question means: When I am dead, will I still be who I am now, and will I remember those who are dear to me now?

I will answer the questions in those terms also, then; but before I do so, there are several seemingly impractical considerations concerning the nature of life and death, with which we must deal.

First of all, let us consider the fact just mentioned. There is no separate, indivisible, specific point of death. Life is a state of becoming, and death is a part of this process of becoming. You are alive now, a consciousness knowing itself, sparkling with cognition amid a debris of dead and dying cells; alive while the atoms and molecules of your body die and are reborn. You are alive, therefore, in the midst of small deaths; portions of your own image crumble away moment by moment and are replaced, and you scarcely give the matter a thought. So you are to some extent now alive in the midst of the death of yourself - alive despite, and yet because of, the multitudinous deaths and rebirths that occur within your body in physical terms.

If the cells did not die and were not replenished, the physical image would not continue to exist, so now in the present, as you know it, your consciousness flickers about your ever-changing corporeal image.

In many ways you can compare your consciousness as you know it now to a firefly, for while it seems to you that your consciousness is continuous, this is not so. It also flickers off and on, though as we mentioned earlier, it is never completely extinguished. Its focus is not nearly as constant as you suppose, however. So as you are alive in the midst of your own multitudinous small deaths, so though you do not realize it, you are often "dead," even amid the sparkling life of your own consciousness.

I am using your own terms here. By "dead," therefore, I mean completely unfocused in physical reality. Now your consciousness, quite simply, is not physically alive, physically oriented, for exactly the same amount of time as it is physically alive and oriented. This may sound confusing, but hopefully we shall make it clearer. There are pulsations of consciousness, though again you may not be aware of them.

Consider this analogy. For one instant your consciousness is "alive," focused in physical reality. Now for the next instant it is focused somewhere else entirely, in a different system of reality. It is unalive, or "dead" to your way of thinking. The next instant it is "alive" again, focused in your reality, but you are not aware of the intervening instant of unaliveness. Your sense of continuity therefore is built up entirely on every other pulsation of consciousness.

Remember this is an analogy, so that the word "instant" should not be taken too literally. There is, then, what we can call an underside of consciousness. Now, in the same way, atoms and molecules exist so that they are "dead," or inactive within your system, then alive or active, but you cannot perceive the instant in which they do not exist. Since your bodies and your entire physical universe are composed of atoms and molecules, then I am telling you that the entire structure exists in the same manner. It flickers off and on, in other words, and in a certain rhythm, as, say, the rhythm of breath.

There are overall rhythms, and within them an infinity of individual variations - almost like cosmic metabolism. In these terms, what you call death is simply the insertion of a longer duration of that pulsation of which you are not aware, a long pause in that other dimension, so to speak.

The death, say, of physical tissue, is merely a part of the process of life as you know it in your system, a part of the process of becoming. And from those tissues, as you know, new life will spring.

Consciousness - human consciousness - is not dependent upon the tissues, and yet there is no physical matter that is not brought into being by some portion of consciousness. For example, when your individual consciousness has left the body in a way that I will shortly explain, then the simple consciousnesses of atoms and molecules remain, and are not annihilated.

In your present situation you arbitrarily consider yourselves to be dependent upon one given physical image: You identify yourself with your body.

As mentioned earlier, all through your lifetime, portions of that body die, and the body that you have now does not contain one particle of physical matter that "it" had, say ten years ago. Your body is completely different now, then, than it was ten years ago. The body that you had ten years ago, my dear readers, is dead. Yet obviously you do not feel that you are dead, and you are quite able to read this book with the eyes that are composed of completely new matter. The pupils, the "identical" pupils that you have now, did not exist ten years ago, and yet there seems to be no great gap in your vision.

This process, you see, continues so smoothly that you are not aware of it. The pulses mentioned earlier are so short in duration that your consciousness skips over them merrily, yet your physical perception cannot seem to bridge the gap when the longer rhythm of pulsation occurs. And so this is the time that you perceive as death. What you want to know, therefore, is what happens when your consciousness is directed away from physical reality, and when momentarily it seems to have no image to wear.

Quite practically speaking, there is no one answer, for each of you is an individual. Generally speaking, of course, there is an answer that will serve to cover main issues of this experience, but the kinds of deaths have much to do with the experience that consciousness undergoes. Also involved is the development of the consciousness itself, and its overall characteristic method of handling experience.

The ideas that you have involving the nature of reality will strongly color your experiences, for you will interpret them in the light of your beliefs, even as now you interpret daily life according to your ideas of what is possible or not possible. Your consciousness may withdraw from your body slowly or quickly, according to many variables.

In many cases of senility, for example, the strongly organized portions of personality have already left the body, and are meeting the new circumstances. The fear of death itself can cause such a psychological panic that out of a sense of self-preservation and defense you lower your consciousness so that you are in a state of coma, and you may take some time to recover.

A belief in hell fires can cause you to hallucinate Hades' conditions. A belief in a stereotyped heaven can result in a hallucination of heavenly conditions. You always form your own reality according to your ideas and expectations. This is the nature of consciousness in whatever reality it finds itself. Such hallucinations, I assure you, are temporary.

Consciousness must use its abilities. The boredom and stagnation of a stereotyped heaven will not for long content the striving consciousness. There are teachers to explain the conditions and circumstances. You are not left alone, therefore, lost in mazes of hallucination. You may or may not realize immediately that you are dead in physical terms.

You will find yourself in another form, an image that will appear physical to you to a large degree, as long as you do not try to manipulate within the physical system with it. Then the differences between it and the physical body will become obvious.

If you firmly believe that your consciousness is a product of your physical body, then you may attempt to cling to it. There is an order of personalities, an honorary guard, so to speak, who are ever ready to lend assistance and aid, however.

Now this honorary guard is made up of people in your terms both living and dead. Those who are living in your system of reality perform these activities in an "out-of-body" experience while the physical body sleeps. They are familiar with the projection of consciousness, with the sensations involved, and they help orient those who will not be returning to the physical body.

These people are particularly helpful because they are still involved with physical reality, and have a more immediate understanding of the feelings and emotions involved at your end. Such persons may or may not have a memory of their nightly activities. Experiences with projection of consciousness and knowledge of the mobility of con-sciousness, are therefore very helpful as preparations for death. You can experience the after-death environment beforehand, so to speak, and learn the conditions that will be encountered.

This is not, incidentally, necessarily any kind of somber endeavor, nor are the after-death environments somber at all. To the contrary, they are generally far more intense and joyful than the reality you now know.

You will simply be learning to operate in a new environment in which different laws apply, and the laws are far less limiting than the physical ones with which you now operate. In other words, you must learn to understand and use new freedoms.

Even these experiences will vary, however, and even this state is a state of becoming, for many will continue into other physical lives. Some will exist and develop their abilities in different systems of reality altogether, and so for a time will remain in this "intermediary" state.

For those of you who are lazy I can offer no hope: Death will not bring you an eternal resting place. You may rest, if this is your wish, for a while. Not only must you use your abilities after death, however, but you must face up to yourself for those that you did not use during your previous existence.

Those of you who had faith in life after death will find it much easier to accustom yourself to the new conditions. Those of you who do not have such faith may gain it in a different way, by following through in the exercises I will give you later in this book; for these will enable you to extend your perceptions to these other layers of reality if you are persistent, expectant, and determined.

Now consciousness as you know it is used to these brief gaps of physical nonexistence mentioned earlier. Longer gaps disorient it to varying degrees, but these are not unusual. When the physical body sleeps, consciousness often leaves the physical system for fairly long periods, in your terms. But because the consciousness is not in the normally physically awake state, it is not aware of these gaps and is relatively unconcerned.

If consciousness vacated the body for the same amount of time from a normally physically awake state, it would consider itself dead, for it could not rationalize the gap of dimension and experience. Therefore in the sleep state, each of you have undergone - to some degree - the same kind of absence of consciousness from physical reality that you experience during death.

In these cases, you return to the body, but you have passed over the threshold into these other existences many many times, so it will not be as unfamiliar to you as you may now suppose. Dream-recall experiments and other mental disciplines to be mentioned later will make these points quite clear to all of you who embark upon the suggested exercises.

Now, you may or may not be greeted by friends or relatives immediately following death. This is a personal matter, as always. Overall, you may be far more interested in people that you have known in past lives than those close to you in the present one, for example.

Your true feeling toward relatives who are also dead will be known to you and to them. There is no hypocrisy. You do not pretend to love a parent who did little to earn your respect or love. Telepathy operates without distortion in this after-death period, so you must deal with the true relationships that exist between yourself and all relatives and friends who await you.

You may find that someone you considered merely an enemy actually deserved your love and respect, for example, and you will then treat him accordingly. Your own motives will be crystal clear. You will react to this clearness, however, in your own way. You will not be automatically wise if you were not so before, but neither will there be a way to hide from your own feelings, emotions, or motives. Whether or not you accept inferior motives in yourself or learn from them is still up to you. The opportunities for growth and development are very rich, however, and the learning methods at your disposal very effective.

You examine the fabric of the existence you have left, and you learn to understand how your experiences were the result of your own thoughts and emotions and how these affected others. Until this examination is through, you are not yet aware of the larger portions of your own identity. When you realize the significance and meaning of the life you have just left, then you are ready for conscious knowledge of your other existences.

You become aware, then, of an expanded awareness. What you are begins to include what you have been in other lives, and you begin to make plans for your next physical existence, if you decide upon one. You can instead enter another level of reality, and then return to a physical existence if you choose.

Your consciousness, as you think of it, may of course leave your body entirely before physical death. (As mentioned earlier, there is no precise point of death, but I am speaking as if there is for the sake of your convenience.)

Your consciousness leaves the physical organism in various ways, according to the conditions. In some cases the organism itself is still able to function to some degree, although without the leadership or organization that existed previously. The simple consciousness of atoms, cells, and organs continues to exist, after the main conscious-ness has left, for some time.

There may or may not be disorientation on your part, according to your beliefs and development. Now I do not necessarily mean intellectual development. The intellect should go hand in hand with the emotions and intuitions, but if it pulls against these too strongly, difficulties can arise when the newly freed consciousness seizes upon its ideas about reality after death, rather than facing the particular reality in which it finds itself. It can deny feeling, in other words, and even attempt to argue itself out of its present independence from the body.

Again, as mentioned earlier, an individual can be so certain that death is the end of all, that oblivion, though temporary, results. In many cases, immediately on leaving the body there is, of course, amazement and a recognition of the situation. The body itself may be viewed, for example, and many funerals have a guest of honor amidst the com-pany - and no one gazes into the face of the corpse with as much curiosity and wonder.

At this point many variations in behavior emerge, each the result of individual background, knowledge, and habit. The surroundings in Which the dead find themselves will often vary. Vivid hallucinations may form experience quite as real as any in mortal life. Now, I have told you that thoughts and emotions form physical reality, and they form after-death experience. This does not mean that the experiences are not valid, any more than it means that physical life is not valid.

Certain images have been used to symbolize such a transition from one existence to another, and many of these are extremely valuable in that they provide a framework with understandable references. The crossing of the River Styx is such a one. The dying expected certain procedures to occur in a more or less orderly fashion. The maps were known beforehand. At death, the consciousness hallucinated the river vividly. Relatives and friends already dead entered into the ritual, which was a profound ceremony also on their parts. The river was as real as any that you know, as treacherous to a traveler alone without proper knowledge. Guides were always at the river to help such travelers across.

It does not do to say that such a river is illusion. The symbol is reality, you see. The way was planned. Now, that particular map is no longer generally in use. The living do not know how to read it. Christianity has believed in a heaven and a hell, a purgatory, and reckoning; and so, at death, to those who so believe in these symbols, another ceremony is enacted, and the guides take on the guises of those beloved figures of Christian saints and heroes.

Then with this as framework, and in terms that they can understand, such individuals are told the true situation. Mass religious movements have for centuries fulfilled that purpose, in giving man some plan to be followed. It little mattered that later the plan was seen as a child's primer, a book of instructions complete with colorful tales, for the main purpose was served and there was little disorientation.

In periods where no such mass ideas are held, there is more disorientation, and when life after death is completely denied, the problem is somewhat magnified. Many, of course, are overjoyed to find themselves still conscious. Others have to learn all over again about certain laws of behavior, for they do not realize the creative potency of their thoughts or emotions.

Such an individual may find himself in ten different environments within the flicker of an eyelash, for example, with no idea of the reason behind the situation. He will see no continuity at all, and feel himself flung without rhyme or reason from one experience to another, never realizing that his own thoughts are propelling him quite literally.

I am speaking now of the events immediately following death, for there are other stages. Guides will helpfully become a part of your hallucinations, in order to help you out of them, but they must first of all get your trust.

At one time - in your terms - I myself acted as such a guide; as in a sleep state Ruburt now follows the same road. The situation is rather tricky from the guide's viewpoint, for psychologically utmost discretion must be used. One man's Moses, as I discovered, may not be another man's Moses. I have served as a rather creditable Moses on several occasions - and once, though this is hard to believe, to an Arab.

The Arab was a very interesting character, by the way, and to illustrate some of the difficulties involved, I will tell you about him. He hated the Jews, but somehow he was obsessed with the idea that Moses was more powerful than Allah, and for years this was the secret sin upon his conscience. He spent some time in Constantinople at the time of the Crusades. He was captured, and ended up with a group of Turks, all to be executed by the Christians, in this case very horribly so. They forced his mouth open and stuffed it with burning coals, as a starter. He cried to Allah, and then in greater desperation to

Moses, and as his consciousness left his body, Moses was there.

He believed in Moses more than he did Allah, and I did not know until the last moment which form I was to assume. He was a very likable chap, and under the circumstances I did not mind when he seemed to expect a battle for his soul. Moses and Allah were to fight for him. He could not rid himself of the idea of force, though he had died by force, and nothing could persuade him to accept any kind of peace or contentment, or any rest, until some kind of battle was wrought.

A friend and I, with some others, staged the ceremony, and from apposite clouds in the sky Allah and I shouted out our claims upon his soul - while he, poor man, cowered on the ground between us. Now while I tell this story humorously, you must understand that the man's belief brought it about, and so to set him free, we worked it through.

I called upon Jehovah, but to no avail, because our Arab did not know of Jehovah - only of Moses - and it was in Moses he put his faith. Allah drew a cosmic sword and I set it afire so that he dropped it. It fell o the ground and set the land aflame. Our Arab cried out again. He Saw leagues of followers behind Allah, and so leagues of followers appeared behind me. Our friend was convinced that one of the three of us must be destroyed, and he feared mightily that he would be the victim.

Finally the opposing clouds in which we appeared came closer. In , my hand I held a tablet that said: "Thou shalt not kill." Allah held a sword. As we came closer we exchanged these items, and our followers merged. We came together, forming the image of a s-u-n, and we said: "We are one."

The two diametrically opposed ideas had to merge or the man would have had no peace, and only when these opposites were united could we begin to explain his situation.

To be such a guide requires great discipline and training.

Before the event just mentioned, for example, I had spent many lifetimes acting as a guide under the tutorship of another in my daily sleep states.

It is possible for example to lose yourself momentarily in the hallucinations that are being formed, and in such cases another teacher must bail you out. Delicate probing of the psychological processes is necessary, and the variety of hallucinations in which you may become involved is endless. You may, for example, take the form of an individual's dearly beloved dead pet.

All of these hallucinatory activities take place usually some short time immediately following death. Some individuals are fully aware of their circumstances, however, because of previous training and development, and they are ready after a rest, if they desire to progress to other stages.

They may, for example, become aware of their own reincarnational selves, recognizing quite readily personalities they knew in other lives, if those personalities are not otherwise engaged. They may deliberately now hallucinate, or they may "relive" certain portions of past lives if they choose. Then there is a period of self-examination, a rendering of accounts, so to speak, in which they are able to view their entire per-formance, their abilities and weak points and to decide whether or not they will return to physical existence.

Any given individual may experience any of these stages, you see; except for the self-examination, many may be sidestepped entirely. Since the emotions are so important, it is of great benefit if friends are waiting for you. In many instances, however, these friends have progressed to other stages of activity, and often a guide will take the guise of a friend for a while, so that you will feel more confident.

Of course, it is only because most people believe that you cannot leave your body that you do not consciously have out-of-body experiences with any frequency, generally speaking, in your lifetimes. Such experiences would acquaint you far better than words with some understanding of the conditions that will be encountered.

Remember that in one way, your physical existence is the result of mass hallucination. Vast gulfs exist between one man's reality and another's. After death, experience has as much organization, highly intricate and involved, as you know now. You have your private hallucinations now, only you do not realize what they are. Such hallucinations as I have been speaking of, intense symbolistic encounters, can also occur in your sleep states, when the personality is at a time of great change, or when opposing ideas must be unified, or if one must give Way to another. These are highly charged, significant psychological and psychic events, whether they happen before or after death.

Occurring in the dream state, they can change the course of a civilization. After death, an individual may visualize his life as an animal with which he must come to terms, and such a battle or encounter has far-reaching consequences, for the man must come to terms with all portions of himself. In this case, whether the hallucination ends with him riding the animal, making friends with it, domesticating it, killing it or being killed by it, each alternative is carefully weighed, and the results will have much to do with his future development.

This "life-symbolization" may be adopted by those who gave little thought to self-examination during their lifetime. It is a part of the self examination process, therefore, in which an individual forms his life into an image and then deals with it. Such a method is not used by all. Sometimes a series of such episodes are necessary... .

One of Ruburt's students wondered whether or not there was any kind of organization in the immediate after-death experiences. Since this is a question that will come into many minds, I will deal with it here.

First of all, it should be obvious from what I have said so far that there is no one after-death reality, but [that] each experience is different. Generally speaking, however, there are dimensions into which these individual experiences will fall. For example, there is an initial stage for those who are still focused strongly in physical reality, and for those who need a period of recuperation and rest. On this level there will be hospitals and rest homes. The patients do not yet realize that there is nothing wrong with them at all.

In some cases, the idea of illness is so strong that they have built their earthly years about this psychological center. They project ill conditions upon the new body as they did upon the old one. They are given various kinds of treatment of a psychic nature, and told that the condition of that body is being brought about by the nature of their own beliefs.

Now, many individuals do not need to pass through this particular period. It goes without saying that the hospitals and training centers are not physical in your terms. They are often, in fact, maintained en masse by the guides who carry out the necessary plans. Now you may call this mass hallucination if you will. The fact is that to those encountering that reality, the events are quite real.

There are also training centers. In these the nature of reality is explained in accordance with an individual's ability to understand and perceive it. The familiar parables, for some, will still be used at least initially, and then these individuals will be gradually weaned away from them. In these centers there are certain classes in which instruction is given for the benefit of those who chose to return to the physical en-vironment.

They are taught, in other words, the methods that allow them to translate emotion and thought into physical actuality. There is no time lag, as there must be in the three-dimensional system, between the initiation of such thoughts and their materialization.

All of this occurs more or less at one level, though you must understand that I am simplifying the issues here to some extent. For example, some individuals do not undergo any such periods, but because of development and progress during their past lives, they are ready to begin more ambitious programs.

Now I have spoken of such development earlier. Some of my readers, not being perhaps aware of any psychic ability of their own, might think then that they are in for a long and protracted period of afterdeath training. Let me hasten to tell you that all such ability is not necessarily conscious, and that much of it takes place during the sleep state when you are simply not aware of it.

You may after death utterly refuse to believe that you are dead, and continue to focus your emotional energy toward those you have known in life.

If you have been obsessed with a particular project, for example, you may try to complete it. There are always guides to help you understand your situation, but you may be so engrossed that you pay them no heed.

I will cover the subject of ghosts separately, rather than in this chapter. Suffice it to say that large fields of emotional focus toward physical reality can hold you back from further development.

When consciousness leaves the body and is away for some time then the connection is, of course, broken. In out-of-body states the connection still holds. Now it is possible for an individual who has died to completely misinterpret the experience and attempt to reenter the corpse. This can happen when the personality identified himself almost exclusively with the physical image.

It is not common. But nevertheless, under various circumstances, such individuals will attempt to reactivate the physical mechanism, becoming more panicstricken when they discover the body's condition. Some, for example, have wept over the corpse long after the mourners have left, not realizing that they themselves are completely whole - where, for example, the body may have been ill or the organs beyond repair.

They are like a dog worrying a bone. Those who have not identified their consciousness with the body completely, find it much easier to leave it. Those who have hated the body find, strangely enough, that immediately after death they are quite drawn to it.

All of these circumstances then may or may not occur according to the individual involved. However, after leaving the physical body, you will immediately find yourself in another. This is the same kind of form in which you travel in out-of-body projections, and again let me remind my readers that each of them leaves the body for some time each night during sleep.

This form will seem physical. It will not be seen by those still in the physical body however, generally speaking. It can do anything that you do now in your dreams. Therefore it flies, goes through solid objects, and is moved directly by your will, taking you, say, from one location to another as you may think of these locations.

If you wonder what Aunt Sally is doing in, say, Poughkeepsie, New York, then you will find yourself there. However, you cannot as a rule manipulate physical objects. You cannot pick up a lamp or throw a dish. This body is yours instantly, but it is not the only form that you will have. For that matter, this image is not a new one. It is interwound with your physical body now, but you do not perceive it. Following death, it will be the only body you are aware of for some time.

Much later and on many levels you will finally learn to take many forms, as you choose, consciously. In one manner of speaking you do this now, you see, translating your psychological experience your thoughts and emotions - quite literally but unconsciously into physical objects. You may find that when you imagine yourself as a child after death - that you suddenly have the form of the child that you were. For a certain period of time, therefore, you can manipulate this form so that it takes any appearance that it had when it was connected with your physical form in the immediately previous physical life. You may die at eighty and after death think of the youth and vitality that you had at twenty and find then that your form changes to correspond with this inner image.

Most individuals after death choose a more mature image that usually corresponds to the peak physical abilities, regardless of the age when the physical peak was reached. Others choose instead to take the form they had at the particular point when the greatest mental or emotional heights were achieved, regardless of the beauty or age that characterized the form.

You will feel comfortable with the form that you choose, therefore, and you will usually use it when you want to communicate with others you have known; though for such communications with the living, you may instead adopt the form you had when you were known to the individual you want to contact.

These after-death environments do not exist necessarily on other planets. They do not take up space, so the question, "Where does all this happen?" is meaningless in basic terms.

It is the result of your own misinterpretations of the nature of reality. There is no one place therefore, no specific location. These environments exist unperceived by you amid the physical world that you know. Your perceptive mechanisms simply do not allow you to tune in to their ranges. You react to a highly specific but limited field. As I mentioned earlier, other realities coexist with your own at death, for example. You simply divest yourself of physical paraphernalia, tune into different fields, and react to other sets of assumptions.

From this other viewpoint, you can to some extent perceive physical reality. However, there are energy fields that do separate them. Your entire concept of space is so distorted that any true explanation is highly difficult. Give us a moment.

As your perceptive mechanisms insist that objects are solid, for example, so they insist that such a thing as space exists. Now what your senses tell you about the nature of matter is entirely erroneous, and what they tell you about space is equally wrong - wrong in terms of basic reality, but quite in keeping of course with three-dimensional concepts. In out-of-body experiences from the living state, many of the problems are encountered, in terms of space, that will be met after death. And in such episodes, therefore, the true nature of time and space becomes more apparent. After death it does not take time to go through space, for example. Space does not exist in terms of distance. This is illusion. There are barriers, but they are mental or psychic barriers. For example, there are intensities of experience that are interpreted in your reality as distance in miles.

After death you may find yourself in a training center. Now theoretically, this center could be in the middle of your present living room, in physical space, but the distance between you and the members of your family still living - sitting perhaps, thinking of you or reading a paper - would have nothing to do with space as you know it. You would be more separated from them than if you were, say, on the moon. You could perhaps change your own focus of attention away from the center, and theoretically see the room and its inhabitants; and yet still this distance that has nothing to do with miles would be between you.

CHAPTER 10

"DEATH" CONDITIONS IN LIFE

After-death experiences will not seem so alien or incomprehensible if you realize that you encounter similar situations as a normal part of your present existence.

In sleep and dream states you are involved in the same dimension of existence in which you will have your after-death experiences. You do not remember the most important part of these nightly adventures, and so those you do recall seem bizarre or chaotic as a rule. This is simply because in your present state of development you are not able to manipulate consciously within more than one environment.

You do exist consciously in a coherent, purposeful creative state while the physical body sleeps, however, and you carry on many of the activities that I told you would be encountered after death. You simply turn the main focus of your attention in a different dimension of activity, one in which you have indeed continuously operated.

Now, as you have memory of your waking life and as you retain a large body of such memory for daily physical encounters, and as this fount of memory provides you with a sense of daily continuity, so also does your dreaming self have an equally large body of memory. As there is continuity to your daily life, so there is continuity in your sleeping life.

A portion of you, therefore, is aware of each and every dream encounter and experience. Dreams are no more hallucinatory than your physical life is. Your waking physical self is the dreamer, as far as your dreaming self is concerned: You are the dreamer it sends on its way. Your daily experiences are the dreams that it dreams, so when you look at your dreaming self or consider it, you do so with a highly prejudiced eye, taking it for granted that your "reality" is real, and its reality is illusion.

Its reality is far more native to your being, however. If you do not find coherence in the dream state, it is because you have hypnotized yourselves into believing that none exists. Of course you try to translate your nightly adventures into physical terms upon awakening, and attempt to fit them into your often limited distortion of the nature of reality.

To some extent this is natural. You are focused in a daily life for a reason. You have adopted it as a challenge. But within its framework you are also meant to grow and develop, and to extend the limits of your consciousness. It is very difficult to admit that you are in many ways more effective and creative in the sleep state than the waking state, and somewhat shattering to admit that the dream body can indeed fly, defying both time and space. It is much easier to pretend that all such experiences are symbolic and not literal, to evolve complicated psychological theories, for example, to explain flying dreams.

The simple fact is that when you dream you are flying, you often are. In the dream state you operate under the same conditions, more or less, that are native to a consciousness not focused in physical reality. Many of your experiences, therefore, are precisely those you may meet after death. You may speak with dead friends or relatives, revisit the past, greet old classmates, walk down streets that existed fifty years earlier in physical time, travel through space without taking any physical time to do so, be met by guides, be instructed, teach others, perform meaningful Work, solve problems, hallucinate.

In physical life there is a lag between the conception of an idea and is physical construction. In dream reality, this is not so. Therefore, the best way to become acquainted with after-death reality ahead of time, so to speak, is to explore and understand the nature of your own dreaming self. Not very many people want to take the time or energy.

The methods are available, however, and those who do use them will not find themselves alienated when the full focus of their attention is turned in that direction after death.

Since your conscious memory is connected so strongly with awareness within the body, although you leave the body when it sleeps, the waking consciousness usually has no memory of this.

In the sleeping state, you have memory of everyone you have ever met in your dreams, though you may or may not have met some of these people in your daytime existence. In the sleeping state you may have constant experience through the years with close associates who may live in another portion of the world entirely, and be strangers to you in the waking state.

As your daily endeavors have meaning and purpose, so do your dream adventures, and in these also you attain various goals of your own. These you will continue in the after-death experience. The vitality force, life, and creativity behind your physical existence is generated in this other dimension. In other words, you are in many ways a fleshy projection of your dreaming self.

The dreaming self as you conceive of it, however, is but a shadow of its own reality, for the dreaming self is a psychological point of reference and, in your terms, [of] continuity, that brings together all portions of your identity. Of its deeper nature, only the most developed are aware. It represents, in other words, one strong uniting facet of your entire identity. Its experiences are as vivid and its "personality" as rich - in fact richer - in context as the physical personality you know.

Pretend for a moment that you are a child, and I am trying to undertake the particular chore of explaining to you what your most developed, adult self will be like - and in my explanation, I say that this adult self is to some extent already a part of you, an outgrowth or projection of what you are. And the child says, "But what will happen to me? Must I die to become this other self? I do not want to change. How can I ever be this adult self when it is not what I am now, without dying as what I am.

I am in somewhat the same position when I try to explain to you the nature of this inner self, for while you can become aware of it in dreams, you cannot truly appreciate its maturity or abilities; yet they are yours in the same way that the man's abilities belonged to the child. In the dream state you learn, among other things, how to construct your own physical reality day by day, just as after death you learn how to construct your next physical lifetime.

In dreams you solve the problems. In the daytime you are consciously aware of the methods of problem solving that you learned in sleep. In dreams you set your goals, as after death you set the goals for another incarnation.

Now, no psychological structure is easy to describe in words. Simply to explain the nature of personality as it is generally known, all kinds of terms are used: id, subconscious, ego, superego; all of these to differentiate the interweaving actions that make up the physical personality. The dreaming self is just as complicated. So you can say that certain portions of it deal with physical reality, physical manipulation, and plans; some with deeper levels of creativity and achievement that insure physical survival; some with communication, with even more extensive elements of the personality now generally unknown; some with the continuing experience and existence of what you may call the soul or overall individual entity, the true multidimensional self.

The soul creates the flesh. The creator hardly looks down upon its creation. The soul creates the flesh for a reason, and physical existence for a reason, so none of this is to lead you to a distaste for physical life, nor toward a lack of appreciation for those sensual joys with which you are surrounded. Any inner journeys should allow you to find greater significance, beauty, and meaning in life as you know it now; but full enjoyment and development also means that you use all of your abilities, that you explore inner dimensions with as much wonder and enthusiasm. With proper understanding, therefore, it is quite possible for you to become quite familiar now with after-death landscapes and environments and experiences. You will find them to be as vivid as any You know. Such explorations will completely alter somber preconceptions about existence after death. It is very important that you divest Yourself of as many preconceptions as possible, however, for these will impede your progress.

Generally speaking, if you are fairly content about physical reality, you are in a better position to study these inner environments.

If you see evil all about you in physical life, and if it seems to outweigh the good, then you are not ready. You should not embark upon an exploration of these nightly adventures if you are depressed, for at this time your own psychic state is predisposed toward depressing experiences, whether awake or asleep. You should not embark upon such a study if you hope to substitute inner experience for physical experience.

If your ideas of good and evil are rigorous, unbending, then you do not have the understanding that is necessary for any conscious manipulation in this other dimension. In other words, you should be as flexible mentally, psychologically, and spiritually as possible, open to new ideas, creative, and not overly dependent upon organizations or dogma.

You should be fairly competent and sympathetic. At the same time you should be outgoing enough in your physical environment so that you are capable of handling your life as it is. You need all your resources. This is to be an active exploration and endeavor, not a passive withdrawal, and certainly not a cowardly retreat. Toward the end of this book, methods will be given for those who are interested so that you can explore these after-death conditions consciously, having some control over your experiences and progress.

Here, however, I want to describe these conditions somewhat more thoroughly. Now, in physical life you see what you want to see. You perceive from the available field of reality certain data - data selected carefully by you in accordance with your ideas of what reality is. You create the data to begin with.

If you believe all men are evil, you simply will not experience the goodness in men. You will be completely closed to it. They in turn will always show you their worst side. You will telepathically see to it that others dislike you, and you will project your dislike upon them.

Your experience, in other words, follows your expectations. Now the same applies to after-death experience and to the dream experience, and to any out-of-body encounters. If you are obsessed with the idea of evil, then you will meet evil conditions. If you believe in devils, then you will encounter these. As I mentioned earlier, there is greater freedom when consciousness is not physically directed. Thoughts and emotions are constructed, again, into reality without the physical time lapse. So if you believe you will be met by a demon, you will create your own thought-form of one, not realizing that it is of your own creation.

Therefore, if you find yourself concentrating upon the evils of physical existence in such a manner, then you are not ready for such explorations. It is, of course, possible under such conditions to meet a thought-form belonging to someone else, but if you do not believe in demons to begin with, you will always recognize the nature of the phe-nomena and be unharmed.

If it is your own thought-form, then, in fact, you may learn from it by asking yourself what it represents, what problem that you have so materialized. Now you may hallucinate the same sort of thing after death, use it for a symbol, and undergo a spiritual battle of sorts that would, of course, not be necessary had you more understanding. You will work out your ideas, problems or dilemmas at your own level of understanding.

After-death environments exist all about you, now. Period.

It is as if your present situation and all its physical phenomena were projected from within yourself outward, giving you a continuous running motion picture, forcing you to perceive only those images that were being transposed. These seem so real that you find yourself in the position of reacting to them constantly.

They serve to mask other quite valid realities that exist at the same time, however, and actually from these other realities you gain the power and the knowledge to operate the material projections. You can "set the machine on idle," so to speak, stop the apparent motion, and turn your attention to these realities.

First of all, you must realize that they exist. As a preliminary to the methods I will give later, it is a good idea to ask yourself now and then: "What am I actually conscious of at this time?" Do this when your eyes open, and again when they are closed.

When your eyes are open, do not take it for granted that only the immediately perceivable objects exist. Look where space seems empty, and listen in the middle of silence. There are molecular structures in every inch of empty space, but you have taught yourself not to perceive them. There are other voices, but you have conditioned your ears not to hear them. You use your inner senses when you are in the dream state, and ignore them when you are waking.

The inner senses are equipped to perceive data that is not physical. They are not deceived by the images that you project in three-dimensional reality. Now, they can perceive physical objects. Your physical senses are extensions of these inner methods of perception, and after death it is upon these that you will rely. They are used in out-of-body experiences. They operate constantly beneath normal waking consciousness so that you can even become familiar with the nature of perception after death, now. Period.

In other words, the environment, conditions, and methods of perception will not be alien. You are not suddenly thrust into an unknown; that unknown is a part of you now. It was a part of you before this physical birth, and will be after physical death. These conditions, however, have been blotted out of your consciousness in the main, throughout physical history. Mankind has had various conceptions of his own reality but he has purposely, it seems, turned away from it in the last century. There are many reasons for this, and we will try to cover some of them.

In many ways then, you are "dead" now - and as dead as you will ever be.

While you go about your daily chores and endeavors, beneath nor-mal waking consciousness you are constantly focused in other realities also, reacting to stimuli of which your physical conscious self is not aware, perceiving conditions through the inner senses, and experiencing events that are not even registered within the physical brain. That whole last portion should be underlined.

After death you are simply aware of these dimensions of activity that you now ignore. Now, physical existence predominates. Then, it will not. Nor, however, will it be lost to you; your memories, for example, will be retained. You will simply step out of a particular framework of reference. Under certain conditions you will even be free to use the years seemingly given to you in different ways.

For example: I told you time does not consist of a series of moments, one before the other, though you do perceive it now in that fashion. Events are not things that happen to you. They are materialized experiences formed by you according to your expectations and beliefs. Inner portions of your personality realize this now. After death you will not concentrate upon the physical forms taken by time and events. You may use the same elements, as a painter might use his colors.

Perhaps your life span runs for seventy-seven years. After death you may, under certain conditions and if you choose, experience the events of those seventy-seven years at your leisure - but not necessarily in terms of continuity. You may alter the events. You can manipulate within that particular dimension of activity that represented your seventy-seven years.

If you find severe errors of judgment, you may then correct them. You may perfect, in other words, but you cannot again enter into that frame of reference as a completely participating consciousness following, say, the historic trends of the time, joining into the mass-hallucinated existence that resulted from the applied consciousness of your self and your "contemporaries."

Some choose this rather than reincarnating, or rather as a study before a new reincarnation. These people are often perfectionists at heart. They must go back and create. They must right their errors. They use the immediately-past life as a canvas, and with the same "canvas," they attempt a better picture. This is a mental and psychic exercise, undertaken by many, demanding great concentration, and is no more hallucinatory than any existence.

You may feel that you want to "relive" certain episodes of your life so that you can understand them better. Your life's experience, therefore, is your own. Such conditions certainly are not alien. In ordinary living, you often imagine yourself behaving in a different manner than you did, or in your mind reexperiencing events in order to gain greater understanding from them. Your life is your own personal experienceperspective, and when at death you take it out of the mass physical time context, then you can experience it in many ways. Events and objects are not absolute, remember, but plastic. Events can be changed both before and after their occurrence. They are never stable or permanent, even though within the context of three-dimensional reality they may appear so.

Anything of which you are aware in three-dimensional existence is only a projection of a greater reality into that dimension. The events of which you are conscious are only those fragments of activities that intrude or appear to your normal waking consciousness. Other portions of these events are quite clear to you both in the dreaming state and beneath waking consciousness during the day.

If you want to know what death is like, then become aware of your own consciousness as it is divorced from physical activities. You will find that it is highly active. With practice you will discover that your normal waking consciousness is highly limited, and that what you thought of once as death conditions seem much more like life conditions.

Such other existences and realities as just described coexist with your own, and in the waking state you are not aware of them. Now, often in your dreams you are able to perceive such other situations, but you often wind them into dream paraphernalia of your own, in which case upon awakening you have little clear memory.

In the same way in the midst of life, you dwell with so-called ghosts and apparitions, and for that matter you yourselves appear as apparitions to others, particularly when you send strong thought forms of yourself from the sleep state, or even when unconsciously you travel out of your physical body.

There are obviously as many kinds of ghosts and apparitions as there are people. They are as alert or as unalert to their situation as you are to your own. They are not fully focused in physical reality, however, either in personality or in form, and this is their main distinction. Some apparitions are thought-forms sent by survival personalities out of lingering deep anxiety. They portray the same compulsive-type behavior that can be seen in many instances in your ordinary experience.

The same mechanism that causes a disturbed woman, say, to perform repetitive action such as a constant washing and rewashing of hands, also causes a particular kind of apparition to return time and time again to one place. In such cases the behavior is often composed of repetitive action.

For various reasons, such a personality has not learned to assimilate its own experience. The characteristics of such apparitions follow those of a disturbed personality - with some exceptions, however. The whole consciousness is not present. The personality itself seems to be having a nightmare, or a series of recurring dreams, during which it returns to the physical environment. The personality itself is "safe and sound," but certain portions of it work out unresolved problems, and discharge energy in such a fashion.

They are in themselves quite harmless. Only your interpretation of their actions can cause difficulties. Now in the middle of life, of life conditions, you also appear on occasion as ghosts in other levels of reality, where your "pseudoappearance" causes some comment and is the ground for many myths - and you are not even aware of this.

Now I am speaking generally. Again, there are exceptions where memory is retained, but as a rule ghosts and apparitions are not any more aware of their effect upon others than you are when you appear quite unconsciously as ghosts in worlds that would be quite strange to you.

The combination of thought, emotion, and desire creates form, possesses energy, and is made of energy. It will show itself in as many ways as possible. You only recognize the physical materializations, but as mentioned earlier in this book, you send pseudoforms of yourself out from yourself of which you are not aware; and this is completely aside from the existence of astral travel or projection, which is a much more complicated affair.

You appear in astral form in realities that are comparatively more advanced than your own. You are usually recognized because of your disorientation. You do not know how to manipulate. You do not know the customs. But whether you have a physical form or not, if you have emotions or feelings, these will take form. They have a reality. If you think strongly of an object, somewhere it will appear.

If you think strongly of being in another location, a pseudoimage of yourself will be projected out from you to that place, whether or not it is perceived and whether or not you yourself are conscious of it, or concious in it. This applies to those who have left your physical system and to those who are in it.

All of these forms are called secondary constructions, for as rule full consciousness of the personality is not in them. They are automatic projections.

Now, in primary constructions, a consciousness, usually fully aware and alert, adopts a form - not his "native" one - and consciously projects it, often into another level of reality. Even this is a rather complicated endeavor, and one seldom used for purposes of communication.

There are other much easier methods. I have explained to some degree the way images are constructed out of an available field of energy. You perceive only your own constructions. If a "ghost" wants to contact you therefore, he can do so through telepathy, and you can yourself construct the corresponding image if you desire. Or the individual might send you a thought form at the same time that he telepathically communicates with you. Your rooms are full now of thought forms that you do not perceive; and again, you are as much a ghostly phenomenon now as you will be after death. You are simply not aware of the fact.

You ignore certain temperature variations and stirrings of air as imagination, that are instead indicative of such thought forms. You thrust into the background telepathic communications that often accompany such forms, and you turn aside from all clues that other realities exist quite validly with your own, and that in the midst of one existence you are surrounded by intangible but valid evidence. The very words "life" and "death" serve to limit your understanding, to set up barriers where none intrinsically exist.

Some dead friends and relatives do visit you, projecting from their own level of reality into yours, but you cannot as a rule perceive their forms. They are not more ghostly, or "dead," however, than you are when you project into their reality - as you do, from the sleep state.

As a rule, however, they can perceive you on those occasions. What you often forget is that such individuals are in various stages of development. Some have stronger connections to the physical system than others. The length of time an individual has been dead in your terms has little to do with whether or not you will be so visited, but rather the intensity of the relationship.

As mentioned earlier, however, in the sleep state you may help recently dead persons, complete strangers, to acclimate to after-death conditions, even though this knowledge is not available to you in the morning. So others, strangers, may communicate with you when you are sleeping, and even guide you through various periods of your life.

It is not a simple matter to explain life conditions as you know them, so it is extremely difficult to discuss the complexities of which you are not aware.

The main point I want to make in this chapter is that you are already familiar with all conditions you will meet after death, and you can become consciously aware of these to some extent.

CHAPTER 11

AFTER-DEATH CHOICES AND THE MECHANICS OF TRANSITION

There are unlimited varieties of experience open to you after death, all possible, but some less probable than others, according to your development. Very generally now, there are three main areas, though exceptions and extraordinary cases can take other roads.

You may decide upon another reincarnation. You may decide to focus instead upon your past life, using it as the stuff of new experience, as mentioned previously creating variations of events as you have known them, making corrections as you choose. Or you may enter another system of probability entirely; and this is quite apart from a reincarnational existence. You will be leaving all thoughts of continuity of time behind you in such a case.

Now some individuals, some personalities, prefer a life organization bound about past, present, and future in a seemingly logical structure, and these persons usually choose reincarnation. Others naively prefer to experience events in an extraordinarily intuitive manner, with the organization being provided by the associative processes. These will choose a system of probabilities for their next main endeavor.

Some simply find the physical system not to their liking, and in such a way take leave of it. This cannot be done, however, until the reincarnational cycle, once chosen, is completed, so the last choice exists for those who have developed their abilities through reincarnation as far as possible within that system.

Some, finished with reincarnation, may choose to reenter the cycle acting as teachers, and in such cases some recognition of higher identity is always present. Now there is an in-between stage of relative indecision, a midplane of existence; a rest area, comparatively speaking, and it is from this area that most communication from relatives occurs. This is usually the level that is visited by the living in projections from the dream state.

Before the time of choosing, however, there is a period of self-examination, and your full "history" becomes available to you. You understand the nature of the entity, and you are advised by other portions of that entity, more "advanced" than yourself.

You will become aware of your other reincarnational selves, for example. There will be emotional ties with other personalities whom you have known in past lives, and some of these may supersede your relationships in the immediately past life. This is a meeting place for individuals from your own system also, however.

All necessary explanations are given to those who are disoriented. Those who do not realize that they are dead are here told of their true condition, and all efforts are made to refresh the energies and spirits. It is a time of study and comprehension. It is from this area that some disturbed personalities have those dreams of returning to the physical environment.

It is a place of commerce between systems, so to speak. Conditions and development are important, rather than the length an individual stays in this area. It is an intermediary step, but an important one. In Your dreams you have been here.

Reincarnation involves far more than a simple decision to undergo another physical existence. In this in-between period of which I am speaking, many issues therefore are considered. When most people think of reincarnation, they think in terms of a one-line progression in which the soul perfects itself in each succeeding life. This is a gross simplification. There are endless varieties of this one theme, individual variations. The process of reincarnation is used in many ways, therefore, and in this time of rest individuals must decide on the unique way in which reincarnation will be of use.

Some, for example, choose to isolate various characteristics in a given life, and work on these almost exclusively, basing a given existence upon, say, one main theme. As seen from a physical viewpoint, such a personality would appear very one-sided, and far from a well developed individual.

In one life the intellect may purposely be very high, and those powers of the mind carried as far as the individual can take them. These abilities are then studied thoroughly by the entire personality, both the benefits and the detrimental aspects of the intellect weighed carefully. Through experience in another life this same kind of individual might specialize in emotional development, and purposely underplay intel-lectual abilities.

Again, the physical picture would not be necessarily that of a well developed or balanced personality. Specific creative abilities might be specialized in the same manner. If you looked at these lives as a series of progressions in usual terms, then you would be left with many questions unanswered. Nevertheless the development does occur, but the individuals choose the way in which they prefer this development to take place.

Through denying themselves, say, intellectual development in a given life, personalities also learn the value and purpose of that which they do not possess. The desire for it is then born within them -- if, for example, earlier they did not understand the purposes of the intellect. So in the time of choosing, personalities decide upon the ways in which they will develop in the following incarnation.

Some will choose progression at an easier rate and in a more balanced manner. They will help keep all the strands of personality working at once, so to speak, and even meet again and again people they have known in other lives. They will work out problems at a rather easy rate, rather than in, say, an explosive way. They will pace themselves as dancers do.

In this time of rest and choosing, all counsel is given. Some personalities do reincarnate before they are advised to, for many reasons. This is usually unfortunate in the short run, for the necessary planning has not taken place. But in the long run great lessons will still be learned from the "error." There is no time schedule, and yet it is very unusual for an individual to wait for anything over three centuries between lives, for this makes the orientation very difficult, and the emotional ties with earth have become weak.

The relationships for the next life have to be settled upon, and this involves telepathic communication with all those who will be involved. This is a time, then, of many projections. There are those who are simply loners, who reincarnate without any great feeling for earth's historical periods. There are others who like to return when their contemporaries from some particular past historical time return again, and therefore there are group patterns that involve reincarnational cycles in which many, but not all, are involved.

There are personal cycles of course, in which families may reincarnate, taking different relationships to each other, and you have been involved in several of these.

There are different depths to be probed in reincarnational existences. Some choose to "go all the way." These personalities specialize in physical existence, and their knowledge of this system is most comprehensive. For these there is a movement through each of your racial types - a requirement that is not laid upon most. There is intensive preoccupation with historical periods. Many of these personalities live comparatively short lives, but very intense ones, and they experience more lives than most other individuals. They return, in other words, in as many historical times as possible, finally helping to shape the world as you know it.

In one way or another you are all travelers before you begin even your first reincarnational cycle. To make it as simple as I can, I will say that you do not have the same backgrounds, necessarily, when you enter the physical system of reality. As mentioned earlier, earthly existence is a training period; and yet as far as possible I would like you to forget your ordinary ideas of progression.

Ideas of good, better, best can lead you astray, for example. You are learning to be as completely as possible. In one way you are learning to create yourselves. In so doing during the reincarnational cycle, you are focusing your main abilities in physical life, developing human qualities and characteristics, opening new dimensions of activity. This does not mean that good does not exist, or that in your terms you do not "progress," but your concepts of good and progression are extremely distorted.

Now many personalities have extraordinary talents along specific lines, and these may show up again and again in succeeding existences. They may be tempered, used in various combinations, and yet overall still remain a personality's strongest mark of individuality and uniqueness. While most people adopt different trades, occupations, and interests, for example, throughout the reincarnational cycle, with some there will be a very noticeable line of continuity. It may be broken occasionally, but it is always there. They may be priests or teachers, for example, almost exclusively.

There will be some more material in this book dwelling specifically upon reincarnation, but here I want to point out that in this time of choosing between lives, many more issues are at stake than a simple matter of proposed rebirth.

On occasion, some personalities may be given an exception to the general rule and take a sabbatical from reincarnations, a side trip so to speak, to another layer of reality, and then return. Such cases are not common, however. Such matters are also decided at this time. Those who choose to leave this system, whose reincarnational Cycles are finished, have many more decisions to make.

Entering the field of probabilities can be compared to entering the reincarnational cycle. There will be a sustained focus of awareness and existence in an entirely different sort of reality. Powers latent but barely glimpsed within the multidimensional personality are drawn upon and used when such a choice is made.

The psychological experience varies considerably from that you know, and yet there are hints of it within your own psyche. Here the personality must learn to group events in an entirely different way, and completely without any reliance upon the time structure as you know it.

In this one, as in no other reality, intellectual and intuitive abilities finally work so well together that there is little distinction between them. The self that decides upon reincarnational existence is the same self who chooses experience within the probable system. The structure of personality, however, within the system is quite different. The personality structures with which you are familiar are but one variety of the many forms of awareness available to you.

The probable system, therefore, is as complicated as the reincarnational one. Now I have told you that all action is simultaneous; therefore, on the one hand, you exist in both systems at once. However, to explain to you that decisions are involved, and to separate these events, I must simplify them to some degree. Put it this way: A portion of the whole self focuses in reincarnational cycles and handles developments there. Another portion focuses in probabilities and handles developments there.

(There is also a probable system, of course, in which no reincarnational cycles exist, and a cycle of reincarnations in which no probabilities exist.) The openness and flexibility of the personality is highly important. Doorways to existences can be opened, and the personality can refuse to see them.

On the other hand, all probable existence is open, and consciousness can make a door where there was none in those terms. There are guides and teachers in this time of choosing and decision, to point out alternatives and to explain the nature of existence. All personalities are not at the same level of development. There are therefore advanced teachers and teachers at "lower" levels.

But this is not a time of confusion, but of great illumination, and unbelievable challenge. There will be later material in this book on the god concept that will help you understand some things that remain unsaid in this chapter.

Now for those who choose to recombine, "mix or match," events from the immediately past life - to try it over in new ways for example, lessons must also be given. In many of these cases there is a severe problem and a certain rigidity coupled with the perfectionist characteristics mentioned earlier.

The earth years will be experienced again, but not necessarily in continuity. The events may be used in any way the individual chooses; altered, played back the way they happened for contrast; the way, perhaps, an actor would play an old movie in which he appeared over again in order to study it. Only in this case, of course, the actor can change his approach or the ending. He has full freedom with the events within those years.

The other actors, however, are thought-forms, unless a few contemporaries join in the affair together.

Under these conditions the personality manipulates events consciously of course, and studies the various effects. The focus demanded is quite intensive.

He is told the nature of those who participate with him. He realize they are thought-forms, for example, and his own; but again, thought forms do possess a certain reality and consciousness. They are not cardboard actors for him to simply push around at will. He must, therefore, take them into consideration, and he has a certain respon-sibility toward them.

They will grow in consciousness and continue their own lines of development on different levels. In one way, we are all thought-forms, and this will be further explained in the material dealing with the god concept. Understand, however, that I do not mean that we lack our own initiative for action, individuality or purpose - and remember also here that you live from the inside out. Then perhaps the statement will have 'more meaning for you.

Now in this time of choosing all of these matters are considered, and Suitable preparations made, but the planning itself is all a part of experience and of development. The in-between existence, therefore, is every t as important as the period that is chosen. You learn to plan your existences, in other words. You also make friends and acquaintances in these rest periods whom you meet again and again - and only, perhaps, during in-between existences.

With them you may discuss your experience during reincarnational cycles. These are like old friends. The teachers, for example, are themselves within a cycle. The more advanced ones have already encountered the systems of reincarnation and probabilities, and are themselves deciding upon the "future" nature of their own experience. Their choices, however, are not your choices. While I may mention some other realms of existence open to them in a later chapter, we will not be involved with them here.

The time of choosing is dependent upon the condition and circumstances of the individual following transition from physical life. Some take longer than others to understand the true situation.

Others must be divested of many impeding ideas and symbols, as explained earlier. The time of choosing may happen almost immediately, in your terms, or it may be put off for a much longer period while training is carried on. The main impediments standing in the way of the time of choosing are, of course, the faulty ideas harbored by any given individual.

A belief in heaven or hell, under certain conditions, can be equally disadvantageous. Some will refuse to accept the idea of further work, development, and challenge, believing instead that conventional heaven situations are the only possibility. For some time they may indeed inhabit such an environment, until they learn through their own experience that existence demands development, and that such a heaven would be sterile, boring, and indeed "deadly."

Then they are ready for the time of choosing. Others may insist that because of their transgressions they will be cast into hell, and because of the force of such belief, they may for some time actually encounter such conditions. In either case, however, there are always teachers available. They try to get through these false beliefs.

In the Hades conditions, the individuals come somewhat more quickly to their senses. Their own fears trigger within themselves the answering release. Their need, in other words, more quickly opens up the inner doorways of knowledge. Their state does not usually last as long, therefore, as the heaven state.

Either state, however, puts off the time of choosing and the next existence. There is one point I would like to mention here: In all cases, the individual creates his experience. I say this again at the risk of repeat mg myself because this is a basic fact of all consciousness and existence. There are no special "places" or situations or conditions set apart after physical death in which any given personality must have experience.

Suicides, as a class, for example, do not have any particular "punishment" meted out to them, nor is their condition any worse a priori. They are treated as individuals. Any problems that were not faced in this life will, however, be faced in another one. This applies not only to suicides, however.

A suicide may bring about his own death because he rejects existence on any but highly specific terms chosen by himself. If this is the case, then of course he will have to learn differently. Many others, however, choose to deny experience while within the physical system, committing suicide quite as effectively while still physically alive.

The conditions connected with an act of suicide are also important, and the inner reality and realization of the individual. I mention this here because many philosophies teach that suicides are met by a sort of special, almost vindictive fate, and such is not the case. However, if a person kills himself, believing that the act will annihilate his consciousness forever, then this false idea may severely impede his progress, for it will be further intensified by guilt.

Again, teachers are available to explain the true situation. Various therapies are used. For example, the personality may be led back to the events prior to the decision. Then the personality is allowed to change the decision. An amnesia effect is induced, so that the suicide itself is forgotten. Only later is the individual informed of the act, when he is better able to face it and understand it.

Obviously, however, these conditions are also impediments to the time of choosing. It goes without saying that an obsession with earthly concerns also acts in the same manner. In such instances, often the personality will insist upon focusing his perceptive abilities and energies toward physical existence. This is a psychic refusal to accept the fact of death. The individual knows quite well that he is dead in your terms, but he refuses to complete the psychic separation.

There are instances of course where the individuals concerned do not realize the fact of death. It is not a matter of refusing to accept it, but a lack of perception. In this state such an individual will also be obsessed with earthly concerns, and wander perhaps bewildered throughout his own home or surroundings. The time of choosing will, of course, necessarily be postponed.

The mechanics of transition therefore are highly variable, as the mechanics of physical life are highly variable. Many of the impediments that I have mentioned impede progress not only after death, but during your own physical existence. This should certainly be taken into consideration. An overly strong identification with the sexual characteristics can also hold back progress. If an individual considers identity strongly in terms of male or female identity, then such a person may refuse to accept the fact of the sexual changes that occur in reincarnational existences. This kind of sexual identification, however, also impedes personality development during physical life.

While, generally speaking, the issues just mentioned operate as impediments, there are always exceptions. A belief in heaven that is not an obsessional belief can be used as a useful framework, as a basis of operation in which an individual will often accept easily then, the new explanations that will be offered.

Even a belief in a time of judgment is a useful framework in many instances, for while there is no punishment meted out in your terms, the individual is then prepared for some kind of spiritual examination and evaluation.

Those who understand thoroughly that reality is self-created will have least difficulty. Those who have learned to understand and operate in the mechanics of the dream state will have great advantage. A belief in demons is highly disadvantageous after death, as it is during physical existence. A systematized theology of opposites is also detrimental. If you believe, for example, that all good must be balanced by evil, then you bind yourself into a system of reality that is highly limiting, and that contains within it the seeds of great torment.

In such a system, even good becomes suspect, because an equal evil is seen to follow it. The god-versus-devil, angels-versus-demons - the gulf between animals and angels - all of these distortions are impediments. In your system of reality now you set up great contrasts and opposing factors. These operate as root assumptions within your reality.

They are extremely superficial and largely the result of misused intellectual abilities. The intellect alone cannot understand what the intuitions most certainly know. In trying to make sense in its terms of physical existence, the intellect has set up these opposing factors. The intellect says, "If there is good, there must be evil," for it wants things explained in neat parcels. If there is an up, there must be a down. There must be balance. The inner self, however, realizes that in much larger terms, evil is simply ignorance, that "up" and "down" are neat terms applied to space which knows no such directions.

A strong belief in such opposing forces is highly detrimental, however, for it prevents an understanding of the facts – the facts of inner unity and of oneness, of interconnections and of cooperation. A belief, therefore, an obsessional belief in such opposing factors, is perhaps the most detrimental element, not only after death but during any existence.

There are some individuals who have never experienced during physical life that sense of harmony and oneness in which such opposing factors merge. Such individuals have many stages to go through following transition, and usually many other physical lives "ahead" of them.

As you form your physical existence individually and collectively, so after the time of choosing, you join others who have decided upon the same general kind of experience. A strong cooperative venture is then begun as preparations are made. These will vary according to the type of existence chosen. There are general patterns, therefore. No indi-vidual's reality is identical with another's, and yet there are overall groupings.

Quite simply, a belief in the good without a belief in the evil, may seem highly unrealistic to you. This belief, however, is the best kind of insurance that you can have, both during physical life and afterward.

It may outrage your intellect, and the evidence of your physical senses may shout that it is untrue, yet a belief in good without a belief in evil is actually highly realistic, since in physical life it will keep your body healthier, keep you psychologically free of many fears and mental difficulties, and bring you a feeling of ease and spontaneity in which the development of your abilities can be better fulfilled. After death it will release you from the belief in demons and hell, and enforced punishment. You will be better prepared to understand the nature of reality as it is. I understand that the concept does indeed offend your intellect, and that your senses seem to deny it. Yet you should already realize that your senses tell you many things, which are not true; and I tell you that your physical senses perceive a reality that is a result of your beliefs.

Believing in evils, you will of course perceive them. Your world has not tried the experiment as yet which would release you. Christianity was but a distortion of this main truth - that is, organized Christianity as you know it. I am not simply speaking here of the original precepts. They were hardly given a chance, and we will discuss some of this later in the book.

The experiment that would transform your world would operate upon the basic idea that you create your own reality according to the nature of your beliefs, and that all existence was blessed, and that evil did not exist in it. If these ideas were followed individually and collectively, then the evidence of your physical senses would find no contradiction. They would perceive the world and existence as good.

This is the experiment that has not been tried, and these are the truths that you must learn after physical death. Some, after death, understanding these truths, choose to return to physical existence and explain them. Through the centuries this has been the way. In the system of probabilities that originates within physical reality, this is also the case.

There are systems of probability not connected with your own system at all, much more advanced than any you presently imagine, and in these, the truths of which I have been speaking are well known. In them individuals creatively and purposely create realities, knowing how to do so and giving full rein to the creative abilities of consciousness.

I mention this here simply to point out that there are many other after-death conditions not connected with your system. When you have learned to your capacity in this in-between period, you are ready to progress. The in-between period itself, however, has many dimensions of activity and divisions of experience. As you can see, to put it as simply as possible, everyone does not "know" everyone else.

Instead of countries or physical divisions, you have psychological states. To an individual in one, another might seem quite foreign. In many communications with those in these transitional states, messages through mediums can appear as highly contradictory. The experience of the "dead" is not the same. The conditions and situations vary. An individual explaining his reality can only explain what he knows. Again, such material often offends the intellect that demands simple, neat answers and descriptions that tally.

Most individuals from these stages who communicate with "living" relatives, have not reached the time of choosing as yet, and have not completed their training.

They may still be perceiving reality in terms of their old beliefs. Almost all communications come from this level, particularly when there is a bond of relationship in an immediately previous life. Even at this level, however, such messages serve a purpose. The communicators can inform living relatives that existence continues and they can do it in terms that the living can understand.

They can relate to the living, since often their beliefs are still the same; in fortunate circumstances they can communicate their knowledge as they learn. Gradually, however, their own interests change. They take up relationships in their new existence.

At the time of choosing, therefore, the personality is already preparing itself to leave for another existence. In your terms of time this inbetween period can last for centuries. It can last only a few years. Again, however, there are exceptions. There are cases in which a personality goes very quickly into another physical life, in perhaps a matter of hours. This is usually unfortunate, and is caused by an obsessive desire to return to physical life.

Such a quick return, however, can also be taken by a personality who is charged with a great purpose, who disregards or discards an old physical body, and is reborn almost immediately into a new one in order to finish an important and necessary project already begun.

There are some points I would like to add here. The time of choosing is somewhat more complicated if the last reincarnational cycle, in your terms, is completed.

First of all you must understand, again, that now you do not realize your true identity. You identify instead with your present ego, so when you think in terms of life after death you really mean a future life of the ego that you know. At the end of the reincarnational cycle you understand quite thoroughly that you, the basic identity, the inner core of your being, is more than the sum of your reincarnational personalities.

You might say that the personalities then are but divisions of your self here. There is no competition between them. There never was any real division, but only a seeming one in which you played various roles, developed different abilities, learned to create in new and diverse ways. These reincarnational personalities continue to develop, but they also understand that their main identity is also yours.

When the cycle is finished, therefore, you have complete knowledge of your past lives. The information, experience, and abilities are at your fingertips. This merely means that you understand your multidimensional reality in practical terms. I have used the word multidimensional often, and you see I mean it quite literally, for your reality exists not only in terms of reincarnational existences but also in the probable realities mentioned earlier.

When the time of choosing comes, therefore, the choices available are far more diverse than those offered or possible to personalities who must still reincarnate. There is always the opportunity to teach if you have the inclination and the capabilities, but multidimensional teaching is far different than teaching as you know it now, and it demands rigorous training.

Such a teacher must be able to instruct various portions of one entity, in your terms, at the same time. Say, for example, a particular entity has reincarnations in the fourteenth century, [in] 3 B.C., in the year A.D. 260, and in the time of Atlantis. A teacher would simultaneously be in contact with these various personalities, communicating with them in terms that they could understand. Such communication demands a complete knowledge of the root assumptions of such eras, and of the general philosophical and scientific climate of thought at the time.

The entity might well be exploring several probable systems too, and these personalities would also have to be reached and contacted. The amount of knowledge and training necessary makes such a teaching communicator-career extremely demanding, but it is one of the courses available. The process of learning such information necessarily adds to the development and abilities of the teacher. A delicate manipulation of energy is required, and a constant travel through dimensions. Once such a choice is made, training immediately begins, always under the leadership of a practical expert. The vocation, for it is a vocation, leads such a teacher even into other realms of reality than those he previously knew existed.

Others, finished with reincarnations and of a different overall nature, may begin the long journey leading toward the vocation of a creator. On a much different plane, this can be compared to geniuses in creative fields within your own physical reality.

Instead of paints, pigments, words, musical notes, the creators begin to experiment with dimensions of actuality, imparting knowledge in as many forms as possible - and I do not mean physical forms. What you would call time is manipulated as an artist would manipulate pigment. What you would call space is gathered together in different ways.

Art is created, then, using time - for example - as a structure. In your terms time and space might be mixed. The beauties of various ages, the natural beauties, the paintings and buildings are all recreated as learning methods for these beginners. One of their main preoccupations is to create beauty that impinges itself in as many various dimen-sions of reality as possible.

Such a work would be perceived in your system as one thing, for example, but would also be perceived in probable realities, though perhaps in an entirely different way - a multidimensional art, you see, so free and elemental that it would appear simultaneously in many realities.

Such an art is impossible to describe in words. The concept has no verbal equivalent. These creators, however, are also involved in inspiring those in all levels of reality available to them. For example, inspiration in your system is often the work of such creators.

These "art forms" are often symbolic representations of the nature of reality. They will be interpreted in various ways, according to the abilities of those who perceive them.

In your terms they may be living dramas. They will always be psychic structures, however, existing apart from any given system of reality, but at least partially perceived by many. Some exist in what you might term the astral plane, and you perceive them in visits during the sleep state.

Others are perceived in glimpses or bits and pieces by your temporal mind while you are half-sleeping and half-waking, or in other periods of dissociation. There are various kinds of multidimensional art, and therefore many levels in which the creators work. The whole Christ story was such a creation.

There are also those who choose to be healers, and of course this involves far more than healing as you are familiar with it. These healers must be able to work with all levels of the entity's experience, directly helping those personalities that are a part of it. Again, this involves a manipulation through reincarnational patterns, and here again, great diversification. A healer begins with reincarnational selves with various difficulties. The healing involved is always psychic and spiritual, and these healers are available to help each personality in your system as you know it, in your present time, and in other systems.

In a larger context, and with greater training, advanced healers deal with the spiritual maladies of vast numbers of personalities. There are those who combine the qualities of teacher, creator, and healer. Others choose lines of development that are particularly suited to their own characteristics.

I do not want to discuss the purpose of consciousness's continuous existence or development in this chapter, however. I simply want to make it clear that vast possibilities of progress are possible, and to stress the fact that each personality has full freedom.

The developments of consciousness that take place are natural attributes, natural stages. There is no coercion applied. All of the further developments are inherent in the personality that you know, even as the adult is inherent in the child.

Now these descriptions of after-death events may sound very complicated, particularly if you have been used to a simple tale of heaven or eternal rest. Unfortunately, the words fail to describe many of the basics that I would have you understand. You have within yourself, however, the ability to release your intuitions and to receive inner knowledge.

As you read this book, the words are meant to release your own intuitional abilities. When you are reading it, your own dreams will give you added information and will be in your mind upon awakening if you are alert for them. There is no such simple end to the life that you know, [such] as the story of heaven. There is the freedom to understand your own reality, to develop your abilities further, and to feel more deeply the nature of your own existence as a part of All That Is.

CHAPTER 12

REINCARNATIONAL RELATIONSHIPS

Throughout your reincarnational existences you expand your consciousness, your ideas, your perceptions, your values. You break away from self-adopted restrictions, and you grow spiritually as you learn to step aside from limiting conceptions and dogmas.

Your rate of learning depends entirely upon you, however. Limited, dogmatic, or rigid concepts of good and evil can hold you back. Too narrow ideas of the nature of existence can follow you through several lives if you do not choose to be spiritually and psychically flexible.

These rigid ideas can indeed act as leashes, so that you are forced to circle like a tied puppy dog about a very small radius. In such cases, through perhaps a group of existences, you will find yourself battling against ideas of good and evil, running about in a circle of confusion, doubt, and anxiety.

Your friends and acquaintances will be concerned with the same problems, for you will draw to yourself those with the same concerns. I am telling you again, therefore, that many of your ideas of good and evil are highly distortive, and shadow all understanding you have of the nature of reality.

If you form a guilt in your mind, then it is a reality for you, and you must work it out. But many of you form guilts for which there is no adequate cause, and you saddle yourselves with these guilts without reason. In your dimension of activity there appear to be a wild assortment of evils. Let me tell you that he who hates an evil merely creates another one.

From within your point of reference it is often difficult for you to perceive that all events work toward creativity, or to trust in the spontaneous creativity of your own natures. Within your system, to kill is obviously a moral crime, but to kill another in punishment only compounds the original error. Someone very well known who estab-lished a church - if you will, a civilization - once said, 'Turn the other cheek if you are attacked." The original meaning of that remark, however, should be understood. You should turn the other cheek because you realize that basically the attacker only attacks himself.

Then you are free, and the reaction is a good one. If you turn the other cheek without this understanding, however, and feel resentful, or if you turn the other cheek out of a feeling of pseudomoral superiority, then the reaction is far from adequate.

Now all of this can be applied to your relationships in your reincarnational existences, and of course it also is highly pertinent to your current daily experience. If you hate another person, that hate may bind you to him through as many lives as you allow the hate to consume you. You draw to yourself in this existence and in all others those qualities upon which you concentrate your attention. If you vividly concern your-self with the injustices you feel have been done you, then you attract more such experience, and if this goes on, then it will be mirrored in your next existence. It is true that in between lives there is "time" for understanding and contemplation.

Those who do not take advantage of such opportunities in this life often do not do so when it is over. Consciousness will expand. It will create. It will turn itself inside out to do so. There is nothing outside of yourself that will force you to understand these issues or face them.

It is useless then to say, "When this life is over I will look back upon my experience and mend my ways." This is like a young man saying, "When I grow old and retire, I will use all those abilities that I am not now developing." You are setting the stage for your "next" life now. The thoughts you think today will in one way or another become the fabric of your next existence. There are no magic words that will make you wise, that will fill you with understanding and compassion, that will expand your consciousness.

Your thoughts and everyday experience contain the answers. Any successes in this life, any abilities, have been worked out through past experience. They are yours by right. You worked to develop them. If you look about you at your relatives, friends, acquaintances, and business associates, you will also see what kind of a person you are, for you are drawn to them as they are drawn to you, through very basic inner similarities.

If you examine your thoughts for five minutes at various times during the day for several times a month, you will indeed receive a correct impression of the kind of life you have so far arranged for yourself in the next existence. If you are not pleased with what you discover, then you had better begin changing the nature of your thoughts and feelings.

As you will see later in this book, you can do so. There is no rule saying that in each life you must meet again those whom you have known before; and yet through the nature of attraction, that is often the case.

You may be born into your present family for many reasons. You may find after death a much stronger relationship emotionally with a personality from a past life. If you are married, for example, and have no true rapport with your mate, you may instead find a past wife or husband waiting for you.

Oftentimes members of various groups - military groups, church groups, hunting groups, will in another life form family relationships in which they will then work out old problems in new ways. Families must be considered as gestalts of psychic activity; they have a subjective identity, of which no particular member of the group may be aware.

Families have subconscious purposes, though the individual members of the family may pursue these goals without conscious awareness. Such groups are set up ahead of time, so to speak, in between physical existences. Oftentimes four or five individuals will set themselves a given challenge, and assign to the various members different parts to play. Then in a physical existence the roles will be worked out.

The inner self is always aware of the hidden mechanisms of these family gestalts. Those who have been closely bound through emotional ties often prefer to remain in closely tied or loosely tied physical relationships that continue through many lifetimes. New relationships are always encouraged however, for you can have ingrown reincarnational "families." Many of these form physical organizations that are actually manifestations of inner groupings.

I spoke earlier of rigid concepts of right and wrong. There is only one way to avoid this problem. Only true compassion and love will lead to an understanding of the nature of good, and only these qualities will serve to annihilate the erroneous and distortive concepts of evil.

The simple fact is that as long as you believe in the concept of evil, it is a reality in your system, and you will always find it manifested. Your belief in it will, therefore, seem highly justified. If you carry this concept through succeeding generations, through reincarnations, then you add to its reality.

Let me try to throw some light upon what I am trying to tell you. First of all, love always involves freedom. If a man says he loves you and yet denies you your freedom, then you often hate him. Yet because of his words you do not feel justified in the emotion. This sort of emotional tangle itself can lead to continued entanglements through various lives.

If you hate evil, then beware of your conception of the word. Hate is restrictive. It narrows down your perception. It is indeed a dark glass that shadows all of your experience. You will find more and more to hate, and bring the hated elements into your own experience.

If, for example, you hate a parent, then it becomes quite easy to hate any parents, for in their faces you see and project the original offender. In subsequent lives you may also be drawn into a family and find yourself with the same emotions, for the emotions are the problem, and not those elements that seem to bring them about.

If you hate illness you may bring upon yourself a succeeding life of illness, because the hate has drawn it to you. If you expand your sense of love, of health, and existence, then you are drawn in this life and in others toward those qualities; again, because they are those upon which you concentrate. A generation that hates war will not bring peace. A generation that loves peace will bring peace.

To die with hatred for any cause or people, or for any reason, is a great disadvantage. You have all kinds of opportunities now to recreate your personal experience in more beneficial ways, and to change your world.

In the next life you will be working with those attitudes that are now yours. If you insist upon harboring hatreds within you now, you are very likely to continue doing so. On the other hand, those sparks of truth, intuition, love, joy, creativity, and accomplishment gained now, will work for you then as they do now.

They are, you see, the only true realities. They are the only real foundations of existence. It is foolish, as Ruburt once said, to hate a storm or shake your fists at it and call it names. You laugh if you think of children or natives in such activities. It is useless to personify a storm and treat it as a demon, focusing upon its destructive elements, or those elements that to you appear destructive.

Change of form is not destructive. The explosive energy of a storm is highly creative. Consciousness is not annihilated. A storm is part of creativity. You view it from your own perspective, and yet one individual will feel within the storm the unending cycle of creativity, and another will personify it as the work of the devil.

Through all your lives you will interpret the reality that you see in your own way, and that way will have its effect upon you, and in turn upon others. The man who literally hates, immediately sets himself up in this fashion: He prejudges the nature of reality according to his own limited understanding.

Now I am emphasizing the issue of hate in this chapter on reincarnation because its results can be so disastrous. A man who hates always believes himself justified. He never hates anything that he believes to be good. He thinks he is being just, therefore, in his hatred, but the hatred itself forms a very strong claim that will follow him throughout his lives, until he learns that only the hatred itself is the destroyer.

Far be it from me to interrupt your edifying conversation. Remember what you concentrate upon, and we will leave it at that. Now we will resume dictation.

I would like to make it clear that there is nothing to be gained, either, by hating hatred. You fall into the same trap.

What is needed is a basic trust in the nature of vitality, and faith that all elements of experience are used for a greater good, whether or not you can perceive the way in which "evil" is transmuted into creativity. What you love will also be a part of your experience in this life and others.

The most important idea to be remembered is that no one thrusts the experience of any given lifetime upon you. It is formed faithfully according to your own emotions and beliefs. The great power and energy of love and creativity is apparent in the mere fact of your existence. This is the truth so often forgotten - that [the combination of] consciousness and existence continues and absorbs those elements that seem to you so destructive.

Hate is powerful if you believe in it, and yet though you hate life, you will continue to exist. You have made appointments, each of you, that you have forgotten. They were signed, so to speak, before you were born in this existence. In many cases the friends that you make were close to you long before you met them in this present life.

This does not mean that every one in your present acquaintanceship has been known to you, and it certainly does not imply a boring record played over and over again, for each encounter is a new one in its own way. Remembering what I said about families, realize also that towns and villages may also be composed of the past inhabitants of other such towns and villages, transposed with new experiences and backgrounds, as the group tries different experiments.

Now sometimes, there are also such variations in that the inhabitants of a particular town now may be the reborn inhabitants of those who lived, say, in 1632 in a small Irish village. They may be transposed to a town in Idaho.

Some who wanted to travel from the Old World to the New, may be reborn in the new one. You must remember also that abilities from past lives are at your disposal for your present use. You reap your own rewards. Information concerning these is often given to you in the sleep state, and there is a kind of gestalt type of dream, a root dream, by which those who have known each other in past lives now communicate.

In such dreams, general mass-information is given, that the individuals then use as they desire. Overall plans for development are made, as the group members, say, of a town decide upon its destiny. Some individuals always choose to be born as a part of some group - reborn, in other words, with past contemporaries, while others, disdaining such endeavors, return in much more isolated positions.

This is a matter of psychological feeling. Some individuals are more at ease, more assured, and more capable working with others in this case. You could consider an analogy in which John Doe follows his kindergarten class all the way through high school. In a reincarnational situation, he would always choose to return with associates. Others, however, would rather skip from school to school, appearing alone, relatively speaking, with greater freedom, more challenge, but without the comforting framework of security chosen by the others.

In each case the individual is the judge, not only of each succeeding life, its time, environment, and historical date, but also of its overall character and methods of accomplishment. There are as many different ways to reincarnate, therefore, as there are inner selves, and each inner self will choose its own characteristic methods.

In each life you are meant to check the exterior environment in order to learn your inner condition. The outer is a reflection of the inner.

You are meant to understand the nature of your inner self, and to manifest it outward. As this is done, the exterior circumstances should change for the better as the inner self becomes more aware of its own nature and capabilities. Theoretically, then, in each life you would become stronger, healthier, wealthier, and wiser, but it does not work that way, for many reasons. As mentioned earlier, many personalities adopt different kinds of experiences, focusing upon development in certain specific areas, and ignoring others perhaps for a series of lives.

No consciousness has the same experiences or interprets them the same, and so each individual utilizes reincarnational opportunities in his own way. Sex changes, for example, are necessary. Some individuals alternate their sex in each life. Others have a series of female lives and then a series of male lives, or vice versa, but the entire reincarnational framework must involve both sexual experiences.

Abilities cannot be developed following a one-sex line. There must be experiences in motherhood and fatherhood. When you get to the point that you realize you are forming your day-to-day existence and the life that you know, then you can begin to alter your own mental and psychic patterns, and therefore change your daily environment.

This realization, however, should go hand in hand with a deep intuitional knowledge of the capabilities of the inner self. These two factors together can release you from any difficulties that have arisen in past lives. The entire structure of your existence will begin to change with these realizations, and an acceleration of spiritual and psychic growth will develop.

There is an inner logic to your current relationships, attitudes, and experiences. If in one life, for example, you hated women, you may very well be a woman in the next life. Only in this way, you see, would you be able to relate to the experience of womanhood, and then as a woman face those attitudes that you yourself had against women in the past.

If you had no sympathy for the sick, you may then be born with a serious disease, again now self-chosen, and find yourself encountering those attitudes that once were your own. Such an existence would usually also include other issues, however. No existence is chosen for one reason only, but would also serve many other psychological experiences.

A chronically ill existence, for example, might also be a measure of discipline, enabling you to use deeper abilities that you ignored in a life of good health. The perfectly happy life for example, on the surface, may appear splendid, but it may also be basically shallow and do little to develop the personality.

The truly happy existence, however, is a deeply satisfying one that would include spontaneous wisdom and spiritual joy. I am not saying, in other words, that suffering necessarily leads to spiritual fulfillment, nor that all illness is accepted or chosen for such a purpose, for this is not the case.

Illness is often the result of ignorance and lazy mental habits. Such a discipline may be adopted however by certain personalities who must take strong measures with themselves because of other characteristics. There is an overall pattern to relationships within lives, and yet this does not mean that you travel through various existences with the same limited and familiar number of friends and acquaintances, merely altered like actors with a change of face or costume.

Groups of individuals come together in various lives for certain purposes, separate, and may or may not come together again in a different time or place. Again, however, there is no rigid rule. Some families are literally reincarnations of their ancestors, but this is not the general case by any means. Deep relationships will continue in one way or another. Others will simply disappear.

The point I want to make is that the opportunity for development and knowledge is as present at this moment, in this life, as it will ever be. If you ignore day-by-day opportunities for development now, no one can force you to accept and utilize greater abilities after death, or between lives. The teachers are there in after-death experience, but there are also teachers here in your existence now.

Some families come together in a particular life not because of great attraction or love in a past existence, but for the opposite reason. Families may be composed, then, of individuals who disliked each other in the past and come together in a close relationship where they are to work together toward a common goal, learn to understand each other better, and work out problems in a different kind of context.

Jointly, each generation has its own purpose. It is this - to perfect inner knowledge, and to materialize it as faithfully as possible outward into the world. The changing physical scene throughout the centuries, as you know them, represents the inner images that have flickered through the minds of the individuals who lived within the world through the various ages.

It is not necessary that you learn about your own past lives, though it may be helpful if you understand that you chose the circumstances of your birth this time.

If you examine your own life now carefully, the challenges that you have set for yourself will become apparent. This is not easy to do, but it is within the grasp of each individual. If you release yourself from hatred, then you automatically release yourself from any such relationships in the future - or any experiences that are based upon hatred.

Knowing your reincarnational background, but not knowing the true nature of your present self, is useless. You cannot justify or rationalize present circumstances by saying, "This is because of something I did in a past life," for within yourself now is the ability to change negative influences. You may have brought negative influences into your life for a given reason, but the reason always has to do with understanding, and understanding removes those influences.

You cannot say, "The poor are poor simply because they chose poverty, and therefore there is no need for me to help them." This attitude can easily draw poverty to you in the next experience.

Each individual is not at the same level of achievement even at the end of the reincarnational cycle. Some possess certain qualities that do not find a counterpart within human experience. Physical existence itself has a different effect upon various individuals. Some find it an excellent medium of expression and development. They are suited to it. They have the knack for expressing themselves in physical ways and objectifying inner feelings faithfully. Others find this difficult, and yet these same individuals may do much better in other levels of reality.

There are "hardy souls" who thrive in physical reality, and who may have difficulties acclimating to other nonphysical areas of activity. In all of these areas, however, deep spiritual or emotional contexts are never negated. Very close friends from past lives, who are in a position to do so, often communicate with you when you are in the dream state, and the relationships are continued though you do not realize it consciously.

On an unconscious basis, you are aware of the birth into physical life of someone you have known in the past. The strangers that you meet in your dreams are often, of course, people now alive - contemporaries - that you have also known in past lives.

There are also passing relationships, contacts made and then dropped. A mate from any given life, for example, may or may not represent someone with whom you have a deep abiding tie, and again you may marry someone because of highly ambiguous feelings from a past life, and choose a married relationship that is not based upon love, though love may emerge.

Twins, incidentally, almost always involve very deep, abiding psychic relationships of a strong, sometimes obsessive nature. I am speaking now of identical twins.

Reincarnational goals also vary greatly. I want to stress that reincarnation is a tool used by personalities. They each use it in their own way. Some enjoy female existences, or have greater fondness for male lives. While both must be encountered, there is a great range of choice and activity. Some personalities will have difficulties along certain lines, and develop with relative ease in other ways.

Predetermination is never involved, for the challenge and circumstances are chosen. Some problems may be put off, for example, for several existences. Some personalities want to solve their strongest problems and get them over with, perhaps in a series of rather trying existences and exaggerated circumstances.

Others of a more placid nature will take their problems one at a time. Rest periods may also be taken, and they are highly therapeutic. For example, an excellent, satisfying life with a minimum of problems may be chosen either as a prelude to a life of concentrated challenge or as a self-adopted reward for a previous difficult life. Those that thoroughly enjoy the physical medium, without being obsessed by it, however, do very well indeed. The "laws" of reincarnation are adapted by the individual personalities to suit themselves.

CHAPTER 13

REINCARNATION, DREAMS, AND THE HIDDEN MALE AND FEMALE WITHIN THE SELF

As I mentioned earlier, each person lives both male and female lives. As a rule, conscious memory of these is not retained. To prevent an overidentification of the individual with his present sex, within the male there resides an inner personification of femaleness. This personification of femaleness in the male is the true meaning of what Jung called the "anima."

The anima in the male is, therefore, the psychic memory and identification of all the previous female existences in which the inner self has been involved. It contains within it the knowledge of the present male's past female histories, and the intuitive understanding of all the female qualities with which the personality is innately endowed.

The anima, therefore, is an important safeguard, preventing the male from over-identifying with whatever cultural male characteristics have been imposed upon him through present background, environment, and education. The anima serves not only as a personal but as a mass-civilizing influence, mellowing strongly aggressive tendencies and serving also as a bridge both in communicating with women in a family relationship, and in communication also as it is applied through the arts and verbalization.

The male will often dream of himself, therefore, as a female. The particular way in which he does so, can tell him much about his own reincarnational background in which he operated as a female. Maleness and femaleness are obviously not opposites, but merging tendencies. The priestess, the mother, the young witch, the wife, and the old wise woman - these general types are archetypes, simply because they are "root elements" representing, symbolically, the various kinds of so-called female qualities and the various kinds of female lives that have been lived by males.

They have also been lived by females, of course. However, the women do not need to be reminded of their femaleness, but again, so that they do not overidentify with their present sex, there is what Jung called the "animus," or the hidden male within the woman.

Again, however, this represents the male lives with which the self has been involved - the young boy, the priest, the aggressive `jungle man," and the wise old man. These are types, representing generally and symbolically past male lives lived by present women. Women, therefore, can learn much about their reincarnational past as men, through studying those dreams in which these types appear, or in which they themselves appear as men.

Through the anima and the animus, so-called, present personalities are able to draw upon the knowledge and intuitions and background that was derived from past existences as the opposite sex. On some occasions, for example, the woman may go overboard and exaggerate female characteristics, in which case the animus or male within comes to her aid, bringing through dream experiences an onrush of knowledge that will result in compensating malelike reactions.

The same applies to a male when he over-identifies with what he believes to be male characteristics, for whatever reason. The anima or woman within will rouse him to make compensating actions, causing an upsurge of intuitive abilities, bringing a creative element to offset aggressiveness.

Ideally, left alone, these operations would result in a balance individually and en masse, where aggressiveness was always used creatively, as indeed it can and should be.

The animus and the anima are, of course, highly charged psychically, but the origin of this psychic charge and the inner fascination are the result of a quite legitimate inner identification with these personified other-sex characteristics.

They not only have a reality in the psyche, however, but they are imbedded in genetically codified data by the inner self - a genetic memory of past psychic events - transposed into the genetic memory of the very cells that compose the body.

Each inner self, adopting a new body, imposes upon it and upon its entire genetic makeup, memory of the past physical forms in which it has been involved. Now the present characteristics usually overshadow the past ones. They are dominant, but the other characteristics are latent and present, built into the pattern. The physical pattern of the present body, therefore, is a genetic memory of the self's past physical forms, and of their strengths and weaknesses.

I will try to put this as simply as possible. There are presently invisible layers within the body, the topmost layer that you see representing, of course, the present physical form. But enmeshed within this there are what amount to invisible layers, "shadow," latent layers that represent previous physical images that have belonged to the personality.

They are kept in abeyance, so to speak. They are connected electromagnetically to the atomic structure of the present body. To your way of thinking, they would be unfocused. They are a part of your psychic heritage, however. Often you can call up a past strength of a previous body, to help compensate for a present weakness. The body does not only carry memory biologically of its own past condition in this life therefore, but indelibly with it, even physically, are the memories of the other bodies that the personality has formed in previous reincarnations.

The anima and the animus are closely connected with these interior body images. These body images are highly charged psychically, and also appear in the dream state. They operate as compensations and reminders to prevent you from over-identifying yourself with your present physical body.

They are, of course, both male and female. When you are ill, in the dream state you often have experiences in which you seem to be someone else with an entirely healthy body. Often such a dream is therapeutic. An "older" reincarnational body has come to your aid, from which you draw strength through the memory of its health.

Reincarnational experiences are a part of the framework of the self, a facet of the multidimensional reality of the living psyche. These experiences will, therefore, be reflected not only in the dream state, but in other layers of activity.

The fabric of the present self is interwoven with these reincarnational "pasts," and from them the present self draws unconsciously from its own bank of personality characteristics, activities, and insights. Often past life memories come to the surface but are not recognized as such, since they appear in fantasy form, or are projected into art creations.

Many writers of historical pieces, for example, are writing out of direct experience with those times. Such instances represent an excellent working rapport between the present self and the unconscious, which brings these memories to the surface in such a way that current life is enriched. More often than not, true awareness of the situation often becomes almost conscious, and just beneath awareness the individual knows the source of his authentic material.

In dreams this reincarnational material is likewise cast into a dramatic mold very frequently. Beneath all this, the anima and the animus work together, again not opposites but blending characteristics. Together, of course, they represent the fount of creativity, psychically as well as physically.

The anima represents the necessary initial "inwardness," the brooding, caring, intuitive, inside-turning characteristics, the inward focusing from which creativity comes.

The word "passive" is a poor one to describe the characteristics of the anima, in that it suggests a lack of motion, and this is hardly the case. It is true that the anima allows itself to be acted upon, but the motive behind this is the desire and the necessity to tune into other forces that are supremely powerful. The desire to be swept along, therefore, is as strong with the anima as the opposite desire for rest. The characteristics of the animus provide the aggressive thrust that returns the personality back outward into physical activities, triumphantly holding the products of creativity that the anima characteristics have secured.

The whole self is obviously the sum of these characteristics, and more. After the final incarnation, the physical, sexual type of creativity is simply no longer needed. You do not need to reproduce physically, in other words. In simple terms the whole self contains male and female characteristics, finely tuned together, blended so that true identity can then arise - for it cannot, when one group of characteristics must be emphasized over the other group, as it must be during your present physical existence.

There are many reasons why the separation has been adopted within your dimension. The reasons have to do with the particular way in which mankind has chosen to evolve and use his abilities; and I will have more to say regarding this point, but it does not belong in this chapter.

The projection of the man's anima, or hidden female self, upon [his] relations is quite natural, and allows him not only to understand them better but to relate with the other female existences of his own. The same is true of the woman's projection of the animus upon male relatives and friends. The reality of the anima and the animus is far deeper then than Jung supposed. Symbolically speaking, the two together represent the whole self with its diverse abilities, desires, and characteristics.

Together they act as a built-in, unconscious stabilizing factor, operating behind the faces of your civilization not only individually but culturally.

Personality as you know it, cannot be understood unless the true meaning of the anima and the animus is taken into consideration. The reincarnational pattern is generally speaking an open one, in that within it there is room for diversity. Each whole self has its own individual characteristics. It can live its lives as it sees fit within the guidelines. There may be a series of male or female existences, unbroken. Such a choice has some drawbacks.

There are, however, no rules dictating the sexual development in varying incarnations, except that experience with both sexes must be taken on, and the various characteristics developed. This does not mean that an equal number of male and female lives must be lived. Some, for example, find it far easier to develop as one sex or the other, and will need more opportunities for experience as the sex with which they expe-rience difficulty.

The animus and the anima become even more important in these instances when a series of one-sex lives are chosen. The original pattern for the animus and anima comes from the whole self before reincarnations. The animus and the anima are born into the individual with the first physical life, and serve as an inner pattern, reminding the per-sonality of its basic unity. Here is another reason for the strong psychic charge behind these symbols and the godlike quality that they can transmit and project.

The male yearns toward the anima because it represents to the deep unconscious those other characteristics of the whole self that, on the one hand, lie latent, and that, on the other hand, struggle for release. The tension between the two leads him to temper aggressiveness with creativity, or to use aggressiveness creatively.

Now there are deep correlations between these symbols and the struggle in which mankind is involved. Your consciousness as you know it, your particular present kind of consciousness, is a statement of awareness brought about by a particular kind of tension, a specific kind of focus arising from the true unconscious of the whole self.

The true unconscious is not unconscious. Instead, it is so profoundly and unutteringly conscious that it bubbles over. The life that you know is simply one of the many areas in which it is conscious. In each facet of its consciousness, literally tremendous power and balance must be maintained to hold aloft this particular consciousness-experience from all others.

Your reality exists in a particular area of activity in which aggressive qualities, thrusting-outward characteristics, are supremely necessary to prevent a falling back into the infinite possibilities from which you have only lately emerged. Yet from this unconscious bed of possibilities you derive your strength, your creativity, and the fragile yet powerful kind of individual consciousness that is your own.

The two-sex division was adopted, separating and balancing these most necessary but seemingly opposing tendencies. Only beginning consciousness needs these kind of controls. The anima and the animus, therefore, are embedded deeply with their necessary complementary but apparently opposed tendencies, and they are highly important in maintaining the very nature of your human consciousness.

There is also a natural tension, then, between sexes that is based n far deeper causes than physical ones. The tension results from the nature of your consciousness that arises from the anima, but depends r its continuation upon the "aggressiveness" of the animus. I have to me extent explained the fascination that one has for the other, as suiting from the inner knowledge of the whole self, that strives to attain true identity as it struggles to combine and fulfill the seemingly opposite tendencies that are a part of it.

At the end of the reincarnational cycle, the whole self is far more developed than it was before. It has realized and experienced itself in a dimension of reality unknown to it earlier, and in doing so, has of course increased its being. It is not a matter, then, of a whole self splitting in half, and then simply returning to itself.

Now there are many matters concerning the nature of conception that should be discussed here. Again, however, there is leeway and many variations. Usually between lives you choose ahead of time your children, and they choose you as parents.

If you are to be born as a male, then the mother serves as a stimulus to activate the symbol of the anima in you, so that the pattern of your own female lives becomes a portion of your next existence. Your mother, if you have known her in the past, will find at your birth an upsurge of dreams involving other existences in which the two of you were together.

These may not even be recorded consciously, but in many cases they are, and are then forgotten. Her own past male lives will help her relate to you as her son. In some cases new mothers may feel highly aggressive and nervous. These feelings are sometimes due to the fact that the male son causes an activation of the animus in her, with a resulting charge of aggressive feelings.

The atoms that compose the fetus have their own kind of consciousness. The volatile awareness-consciousnesses that exist independently of matter, form matter according to their ability and degree. The fetus, therefore, has its own consciousness, the simple component consciousness made up of the atoms that compose it. This exists before any reincarnating personality enters it. The consciousness of matter is present in any matter - a fetus, a rock, a blade of grass, a nail.

The reincarnating personality enters the new fetus according to its own inclinations, desires, and characteristics, with some built-in safeguards. However there is no rule, then, saying that the reincarnating personality must take over the new form prepared for it either at the point of conception, in the very earliest months of the fetus's growth, or even at the point of birth.

The process is gradual, individual and determined by experience in other lives. It is particularly dependent upon emotional characteristics - not necessarily of the last incarnated self, but the emotional tensions present as a result of a group of past existences.

Various methods of entry are adopted. If there is a strong relationship between the parents and the child-to-be, then the personality may enter at the point of conception if he is extremely anxious to rejoin them. Even here, however, large portions of self-aware-ness continue to operate in the between-life dimension.

In the beginning, the womb state under these conditions is a dreamlike one, with the personality still focused mainly in the between-life existence. Gradually the situation reverses, until it becomes more difficult to retain clear concentration in the between-life situation.

In these circumstances, when the personality attaches itself at conception, there is almost without exception strong past-life connections between parents and child, or there is an unceasing and almost obsessional desire to return to the earthly situation - either for a specific purpose, or because the reincarnating personality is presently ob-sessed with earthly existence. This is not necessarily detrimental. The personality can simply realize that it takes to physical experience well, is presently earth-oriented, and finds earthly atmosphere a rich dimension for the growth of its own abilities.

Some personalities are drawn to enter at conception as a result of seemingly less worthy motives - greed, for example, or an obsessional desire that is partially composed of unresolved problems. Other personalities who never completely take to earthly existence may hold off full entry for some time, and even then always remain at a certain distance from the body. At the other end of the scale, before death the same applies, where some individuals remove their focus from physical life, leaving the body consciousness alone. Others stay with the body until the last moment. In the early days of infancy, there is not a steady focus of the personality in the body in any case.

In all cases the decisions have been made ahead of time, as I told you. The reincarnating personality is aware, therefore, when the conception for which it has been waiting takes place. And while it may or may not choose to enter at that point, it is drawn irresistibly to that time and point in space and flesh.

On occasion, long before conception takes place, the personality who will end up as the future child will visit that environment of both parents-to-be, drawn again. This is quite natural.

Between lives an individual may see flashes of the future existence, not necessarily of particular events, but experience the essence of the new relationship and in expectation remind himself of the challenge he has set. In these terms, the ghosts of the future are as real in your homes as the ghosts of the past.

You do not have completely empty shells of matter about to be filled, in that the new personality hovers in and about, particularly after conception and with greater frequency and intensity thereafter. The shock of birth has several consequences, however, that usually draw the personality full blast, so to speak, into physical reality.

Before this, the conditions are fairly uniform. The body consciousness is nurtured almost automatically, reacting strongly but under highly controlled conditions.

At birth, all of this is suddenly over, and [new] stimuli [are] introduced with a rapidity that the body consciousness has never to that point experienced.

It greatly needs a stabilizing factor. Previously the body consciousness has been enriched and supported by deep biological and telepathic identification with the mother. The communication of the living cells is far more profound than you imagine. The identification is almost complete before birth as far as body consciousness alone is concerned.

Until the new personality enters, the fetus regards itself as a part of the organism of the mother. This support is suddenly denied at birth. If the new personality has not entered earlier to any full extent, it usually does so at birth, in order to stabilize the new organism. It comforts the new organism, in other words. The new personality, therefore, will experience birth to varying degrees according to when it has entered this dimension.

When it enters at the point of birth, it is fairly independent, not yet identified with the form it has entered, and acting in a supportive role. If the personality entered at conception or sometime before birth, then it has to some extent identified with the body consciousness, with the fetus. It has already begun to direct perception - though perception has begun whether or not it is so directed - and it will experience the shock of birth in immediate, direct terms.

There will be no distance between the personality and the experience of birth, then. The newly entered personality, as a consciousness, flickers, in that there is a while before stabilization takes place. When the child, particularly the young child, is sleeping, for example, the personality often simply vacates the body. Gradually the identification with the between-life situation dwindles until nearly full focus resides in the physical body.

There are obviously those who identify with the body far more cormpletely than others. Generally speaking, there is an optimum point of focus in physical reality, a period of intensification that has nothing to do with duration. It can last for a week or thirty years, and from then onward it begins to dwindle, and imperceptibly begins to shift to other layers of reality.

Now. A crisis, particularly in very early or very late life, may so shatter the personality's identification with the body that he vacates it temporarily. He may do one of many things. He may leave so completely that the body goes into coma, if the body consciousness has also suffered shock. If the shock is psychological and the body consciousness is still operating more or less normally, then he may revert to an earlier reincarnational personality.

In such a case, this is simply a regression that often passes. Here we become concerned again with the animus and the anima. If a personality believes that it is doing a poor job in a male life, it may activate the anima's qualities, taking on the characteristics of a past female existence in which it handled itself well. Reversing the picture, the same can happen to a woman.

On the other hand, if the personality finds that it has so over-identified with its present sex that its individuality is deeply threatened, then it may also bring to the fore the opposite picture, going so far as to identify again with a past personality of the opposite sex.

The hold of the personality over the body is tenuous in the early years, and grows stronger. The personality, for its own reasons, may decide upon choosing a body that is not aesthetically pleasing. He may never relate to it, and while the existence will serve what purposes he had in mind, there will always be a basic sensed distance between the body and the personality within it.

Those mentioned earlier who enter at the point of conception are usually highly anxious for physical existence. They will, therefore, be more fully developed and show their individual characteristics very early. They seize upon the new body and already mold it. The control over matter is vigorous, and they usually stay within the body, dying either in accidents where death is immediate or in sleep or with a disease that strikes quickly. They are manipulators of matter as a rule.

They are emotional. They work out their problems in immediate, sometimes impatient, tangible ways. They work well with earth materials, and translate their ideas with great force into physical terms. They make cities, monuments. They are architects. They are concerned with forming matter and molding it to their desire.

As a rule, now, those who do not enter your plane of existence until the point of birth are less able manipulators in those particular terms. They are the mean, if such a term can be used, the mean or average.

Now there are some who resist the new existence, even though they chose it, as long as possible. To some extent they must be present at birth, but they can still escape any full identification with the born infant. They hover within and about the form, but half reluctantly. There are many reasons for such behavior. Some personalities simply prefer in-between-life existence and are much more concerned with the theoretical solving of problems than the practical application necessarily involved. Others have discovered that physical existence does not meet their needs as well as they thought it would, and they will progress much better in other fields of reality and existence.

Because of their own characteristics, however, some prefer to set up a certain distance between themselves and their physical existences. They are much more concerned with symbols. They look upon earthly life as highly experimental. They approach it almost with a jaundiced eye, so to speak. They are not interested so much in manipulating matter as they are curious as to the ways in which ideas appear within matter.

Again generally speaking, they are always more at home with ideas, philosophies, and nontangible realities. They are thinkers always a bit apart, their body types showing a lack of muscular development. Poets and artists, while somewhat of this nature, as a rule are more deeply appreciative of the physical values of earthly existence, although they have many of the same characteristics.

The attitude toward the body will always vary, therefore. Various types of bodies may be chosen, but there will still be overall preferences on the part of the whole self, and characteristics that will lead the whole self, so that generally the various lives lived will still have their own individual flavor.

It is almost impossible to speak of when the personality enters the physical body without discussing the ways in which it leaves it, for all this is highly dependent upon personal characteristics and attitudes toward physical reality. Decisions as to future lives may be made not only in between-life conditions but also in dream states in any given life.

You may have already decided for example, now, upon the circumstances for your next incarnation. Although in your terms your new parents may be infants now, or in your scale of time not even born, the arrangements may still be made.

CHAPTER 14

STORIES OF THE BEGINNING, AND THE MULTIDIMENSIONAL GOD

As the present life of any individual rises from hidden dimensions beyond those easily accessible in physical terms, and as it draws its energy and power to act from unconscious sources, so does the present physical universe as you know it rise from other dimensions. So does it have its source, and derive its energy from deeper realities.

History, as you know it, represents but one single light upon which you focus. You interpret the events that you see therein, and you project upon its glimmer your interpretation of events that may occur. So entranced is your concentration, that when you wonder about the nature of reality you automatically confine your question to this one small flickering moment that you call physical reality. When you ponder upon the aspects of God, you unthinkingly speak of the creator of that one light. That light is unique, and if you truly understood what it was, you would indeed understand the nature of true reality.

History, as you think of it, represents but one thin line of probabilities, in which you are presently immersed. It does not represent the entire lifetime of your species or the catalogue of physical activities, or begin to tell the story of physical creatures, their civilizations, wars, joys, technologies, or triumphs. Reality is far more diverse, far richer and unutterable than you can presently suppose or comprehend. Evolution, as you think of it and as it is categorized by your scientists, represents but one probable line of evolution, the one in which, again, you are presently immersed.

There are, therefore, many other equally valid, equally real evolutionary developments that have occurred and are occurring and will occur, all within other probable systems of physical reality. The diverse, endless possibilities of development possible could never appear within one slender framework of reality.

With splendid innocence and exuberant pride, you imagine that the evolutionary system as you know it is the only one, that physically there can be no more. Now within the physical reality that you know, there are hints and clues as to the nature of other physical realities. There are, latent, within your own physical forms other senses, unused, that could have come to the front but in your probability did not. Now I have been speaking of earthly developments, realities therefore clustered about earthly aspects as you know them.

No evolutionary line is a dead one. Therefore if in your system it disappears, it emerges within another. All probable materializations of life and consciousness have their day, and create those conditions within which they can flourish; and their day, in your terms, is eternal.

I am speaking now, in this chapter, mainly about your own planet and solar system, but the same applies to all aspects of your physical universe. You are aware, then, of only one specific, delicately balanced but unique portion of physical existence. You are not only creatures of corporeal being, forming images of flesh and blood, embedded in a particular kind of space and time; you are also creatures rising out of a particularized dimension of probabilities, born from dimensions of actuality richly suited to your own development, enrichment and growth.

If you have any intuitive understanding as yet concerning the nature of the entity or whole self, you will see that it has placed you in a position in which certain abilities, insights, and experience can be realized, and in which your unique kind of consciousness can be nurtured. Your slightest experience has far more repercussions within this multidimensional environment than the physical brain can conceive. For if you are intensely preoccupied with what may seem to be one infinitesimally minute aspect of reality, and while you seem to be completely embedded within it, only the most "surface" elements of the self are so entranced. I do not like the term "surface" in this regard, though I have used it to suggest the multitudinous portions of the self that are otherwise engaged - some of them as entranced in their reality as you are in yours.

The entity, the true multidimensional self, is aware of all of its experiences, and this knowledge is to some extent available to these other portions of the self, including of course the physical self as you know it. These various portions of the self in fact will eventually (in your terms) become fully aware. Period. This awareness will automatically alter what now seems to be their nature, and add to the multiplicitude of existence.

There are many probable systems of reality, therefore, in which physical data predominates, but such physical probabilities represent but one small portion. Each of you also exist in nonphysical systems, and I have explained earlier that your slightest thought or emotion is manifested in many other ways than in your own field of existence.

Only a portion of your entire identity is "presently" familiar to you, as you know. Therefore, when you consider the question of a supreme being, you imagine a male personality with those abilities that you yourselves possess, with great emphasis upon qualities you admire. This imagined god has therefore changed throughout your centuries, mirroring man's shifting ideas of himself.

God was seen as cruel and powerful when man believed that these were desirable characteristics, needed particularly in his battle for physical survival. He projected these upon his idea of a god because he envied them and feared them. You have cast your idea of god, therefore, in your own image.

In a reality that is inconceivably multidimensional, the old concepts God are relatively meaningless. Even the term, a supreme being, is in itself distortive, for you naturally project the qualities of human nature n it. If I told you that God was an idea, you would not understand what I meant, for you do not understand the dimensions in which an idea has its reality, or the energy that it can originate and propel. You not believe in ideas in the same way that you believe in physical objects, so if I tell you that God is an idea, you will misinterpret this to that God is less than real - nebulous, without reality, without purpose, and without motive action.

Now your own physical image is the materialization of your idea of yourself within the properties of matter. Without the idea of yourself, your physical image would not be; yet often it is all you are aware of. The initial power and energy of that idea of yourself keeps your image alive. Ideas, then, are far more important than you realize. If you will try to accept the idea that your own existence is multidimensional, that you dwell within the medium of infinite probabilities, then you may catch a slight glimpse of the reality that is behind the word "god," and you may understand why it is almost impossible to capture a true understanding of that concept in words.

God, therefore, is first of all a creator, not of one physical universe but of an infinite variety of probable existences, far more vast than those aspects of the physical universe with which your scientists are familiar. He did not simply then send a son to live and die on one small planet. He is a wart of all probabilities.

There have been parables told, and stories of beginnings. All of these have been attempts to transmit knowledge in as simple terms as possible. Often answers were given to questions that literally have no meaning outside of your own system of reality.

For example: There was no beginning, and there will be no end, yet parables have been given telling you of beginnings and endings simply because with your distorted ideas of time, beginnings and endings seem to be inseparable, valid events. As you learn to turn the focus of your attention away from physical reality and therefore experience some slight evidence of other realities, your consciousness will cling to old ideas that make true explanations impossible for you to understand. Multidimensional awareness is available to you in your dreams, however, in some trance states, and often even beneath ordinary consciousness as you go about your day.

This awareness gives personal experience with the multidimensional richness that exists not apart from but intermingled with, within, through, and all about your physical world of sense. To say that physical life is not real is to deny that reality pervades all appearance, and is a wart of all appearance. In the same manner, God does not exist apart from or separate from physical reality, but exists within it and as a wart of it, as he exists within and as a wart of all other systems of existence.

Your Christ figure represents, symbolically, your idea of God and his relationships. There were three separate individuals whose history blended, and they became known collectively as Christ – hence many discrepancies in your records. These were all males because at that one of your development, you would not have accepted a female coun-terpart.

These individuals were a wart of one entity. You could not but imagine God as a father. It would never have occurred to you to imagine a god in any other than human terms. Earth components. These three figures worked out a drama, highly symbolic, propelled by concentrated energy of great force.

The events as they are recorded, however, did not occur in history. The crucifixion of Christ was a psychic, but not a physical event. Ideas of almost unimaginable magnitude were played out.

Judas, for example, was not a man in your terms. He was - like all the other disciples - a blessed, created "fragment personality," formed by the Christ personality. He represented the self-betrayer. He dramatized a portion of each individual's personality that focuses upon physical reality in a grasping manner, and denies the inner self out of greed.

Each of the twelve represented qualities of personality that belong to one individual, and Christ as you know him represented the inner self. The twelve, therefore, plus Christ as you know him (the one figure composed of the three) represented an individual earthly personality - the inner self - and twelve main characteristics connected with the egotistical self. As Christ was surrounded by the disciples, so the inner self is surrounded by these physically oriented characteristics, each drawn outward toward daily reality on the one hand, and yet orbiting the inner self.

The disciples, therefore, were given physical reality by the inner self, as all of your earthly characteristics come out of your inner nature. This was a living parable, made flesh among you - a cosmic play worked out for your behalf, couched in terms that you could understand.

The lessons were made plain, as all the ideas behind them were personified. If you will forgive the term, this was like a local morality play, put on in your corner of the universe. This does not mean it was less real than you previously supposed. In fact, the implications of what is said here should clearly hint at the more powerful aspects of godhood.

The three Christ personalities were born upon your planet, and indeed became flesh among you. None of these was crucified. The twelve disciples were materializations from the energies of these three personalities - their combined energies. They were then fully endowed with individuality, however, but their main task was to clearly manifest within themselves certain abilities inherent within all men.

The same kinds of dramas in different ways have been given, and while the drama is always different, it is always the same. This does not mean that a Christ has appeared within each system of reality. It means that the idea of God has manifested within each system in a way that is comprehensible to the inhabitants.

This drama continues to exist. It does not belong, for example, to your past. Only you have placed it there. This does not mean that it always reoccurs. The drama, then, was far from meaningless, and the spirit of Christ, in your terms, is legitimate. It is the probable God-drama that you choose to perceive. There were others that were perceived, but not by you, and there are other such dramas existing now.

Whether or not the Crucifixion occurred physically, it was a psychic event, and exists as do all the other events connected with the drama.

Many were physical but some were not. The psychic event affected your world quite as much as the physical one, as is obvious. The whole drama occurred as a result of mankind's need. It was created as a result of that need, grew out of it, but it did not originate within your system of reality.

Other religions were based upon different dramas, in which ideas were acted out in a way that was comprehensible to various cultures. Unfortunately, the differences between the dramas often led to misunderstandings, and these were used as excuses for wars. These dramas are also privately worked out in the dream state. The God-personified figures first were introduced to man in the dream state, and the way then prepared.

In visions and inspirations, men knew that the Christ drama would be enacted and hence recognized it for what it was when it occurred physically. Its power and strength then returned to the dream universe. It had increased its vigor and intensity through the physical materialization. In private dreams, men then related to the main figures in the drama, and in the dream state they recognized its true import.

God is more than the sum of all the probable systems of reality he has created, and yet he is within each one of these, without exception. He is therefore within each man and woman. He is also within each spider, shadow, and frog, and this is what man does not like to admit.

God can only be experienced, and you experience him whether or not you realize it, through your own existence. He is not male or female, however, and I use the terms only for convenience's sake. In the most inescapable truth, he is not human in your terms at all, nor in your terms is he a personality. Your ideas of personality are too limited to contain the multitudinous facets of his multidimensional existence.

On the other hand, he is human, in that he is a portion of each individual; and within the vastness of his experience he holds an "idea shape" of himself as human, to which you can relate. He literally was made flesh to dwell among you, for he forms your flesh in that he is responsible for the energy that gives vitality and validity to your pri-vate multidimensional self, which in turn forms your image in accordance with your own ideas.

This private multidimensional self, or the soul, has then an eternal validity. It is upheld, supported, maintained by the energy, the inconceivable vitality, of All That Is.

It cannot be destroyed then, this inner self of yours, nor can it be diminished. It shares in those abilities that are inherent within All That Is. It must, therefore, create as it is created, for this is the great giving that is behind all dimensions of existence, the spilling-over from the fountain of All That Is.

I will in due time identify the figure of the third Christ personality. Now, however, I am concerned with the multidimensional aspects of All That Is. Such a reality can only be experienced. There are no facts that can be given that can portray with any faithfulness the attributes of All That Is.

This reality and those attributes will appear within various systems of actuality in keeping with the camouflage data of any given system. The inner experience with the multidimensional God can come in two main areas. One is through the realization that this prime moving force is within everything that you can perceive with your senses. The other method is to realize that this primary motive force has a reality independent of its connection with the world of appearances.

All personal contact with the multidimensional God, all legitimate moments of mystic consciousness, will always have a unifying effect. They will not, therefore, isolate the individual involved, but instead will enlarge his perceptions until he will experience the reality and uniqueness of as many other aspects of reality of which he is capable.

He will feel, therefore, less isolated and less set apart. He will not regard himself as being above others because of the experience. On the contrary he will be swept along in a gestalt of comprehension in which he realizes his own oneness with All That Is.

As there are portions of reality that you do not consciously perceive, and other systems of probability of which you are not consciously aware, so also are there aspects of primary godhood that you cannot at this moment comprehend. There are, therefore, probable gods, each one reflecting in its way the multidimensional aspects of a prime identity so great and dazzling that no one reality form or particular kind of existence could contain it.

I have tried to give you some idea of the far-reaching creative effects of your own thoughts. With that in mind, then, it is impossible to imagine the multidimensional creativities that can be attributed to All That Is. The term `All That Is' can be used as a designation to include all of those probable gods in all of their manifestations.

Now it is easier perhaps for some of you to understand the simple stories and parables of beginnings of which I have spoken. But the time has come for mankind to take several steps further, to expand the nature of his own consciousness by trying to comprehend a more profound version of reality. You have outgrown the time of children's tales. When your own thoughts have a form and reality, when they have validity even in other systems of reality of which you are unaware, then it is not difficult to understand why other systems of probabilities are also affected by your own thoughts and emotions - nor why the actions of the probable gods are not affected by what happens in other dimensions of existence.

CHAPTER 15

REINCARNATIONAL CIVILIZATIONS, PROBABILITIES, AND MORE ON THE MULTIDIMENSIONAL GOD

In a manner of speaking, it can be said that you have reincarnational civilizations as well as reincarnating individuals. Each entity who is born in flesh works toward the development of those abilities that can be best nurtured and fulfilled within the physical environment. He has a responsibility to and for the civilization in which he has each existence, for he helps form it through his own thoughts, emotions, and actions.

He learns from failure as well as success. You think of physical history as beginning with the caveman and continuing up to the present, but there have been other great scientific civilizations; some spoken of in legend, some completely unknown - all in your terms now vanished.

It seems to you that you have, perhaps, but one chance as a species to solve your problems, or be destroyed by your own aggression, by your own lack of understanding and spirituality. As you are given many lives in which to develop and fulfill your abilities, so has the species in those terms been allotted more than the single line of historical development with which you are presently acquainted. The reincarnational structure is but one facet in the whole picture of probabilities. In it you have literally as much time as you need, to develop those potentials that you must develop, before leaving the reincarnational existences. Groups of people in various cycles of reincarnational activity have met crisis after crisis, have come to your point of physical development and either gone beyond it, or destroyed their particular civilization.

In this case they were given another chance, having the unconscious knowledge not only of their failure, but the reasons behind it. They then began with a psychological head start as they formed new primitive groupings. Others, solving the problems, left your physical planet for other points in the physical universe. When they reached that level of development, however, they were spiritually and psychically mature, and were able to utilize energies of which you now have no practical knowledge.

Earth to them now is the legendary home. They formed new races and species that could no longer physically accommodate themselves to your atmospheric conditions.

However, they also continued on the reincarnational level as long as they inhabited phys reality. Some of these have mutated and have long left the reincarnational cycle, however.

Those who have left it have evolved into the mental entities that they always were, you see. They have discarded material form. This group entities still takes a great interest in earth. They lend it support and energy. In a way, they could be thought of now as earth gods. On your planet they were involved in three particular civilizations long before the time of Atlantis; when, in fact, your planet itself in a somewhat different position. Particularly in relationship to three of the other planets that you know. The poles were reversed - they were, incidentally, for three long periods of your planet's his. These civilizations were highly technological; the second one being, fact, far superior to your own along those lines. Sound was utilized far more effectively, not only for healing and in wars, but also to power vehicles of locomotion, and to bring about the movement of physical matter. Sound was a conveyor of weight and mass.

The strength of this second civilization lay mainly in the areas now known as Africa and Australia, although at that time not only was the climate entirely different, but the land areas. There was a different attraction of land mass having to do with the altered position of the poles. Relatively speaking, however, the civilization was concentrated in area; it did not attempt to expand. It was highly ingrown and dwelled upon the planet simultaneously with a large, unorganized, dispersed, primitive culture.

Not only did it make no attempt to "civilize" the rest of the world, but it did everything in its power - which was considerable for a long period of time - to impede any such progress.

The members of this civilization were largely a fringe group from the earlier successful civilization, most of whom had decided to continue existence in other areas of your physical universe. These, however, were particularly enamored of earthly life, and also thought that they could improve upon the last experiment in which they had been involved, though they were free to move on to other layers of existence.

They were not interested in beginning from scratch again as an infant civilization, but in other areas. Therefore much of their knowledge was instinctive with them, and this particular group then went through what you would call the various technological stages very rapidly.

They were particularly concerned in the beginning with developing a human being who would have built-in safeguards against violence. With them, the desire for peace was almost what you would call an instinct. There were changes in the physical mechanism. When the mind signaled strong aggression, the body would not react. Now psychologically you can see vestiges of this in certain individuals, who will faint, or even attack their own physical system, before allowing themselves to do what they think of as violence to another.

This civilization, therefore, left the natives that surrounded them in peace. They did send out members of their own group, however, to live with the natives and intermarry, hoping peacefully to thus alter the physiology of the species.

The energy, often in your time given over to violence, went instead into other pursuits, but began to turn against them. They were not learning to deal with violence or aggression. They were attempting to short-circuit it physically, and this they found had complications.

Energy must be allowed to flow freely through the physical system, controlled and directed mentally, or psychically if you prefer.

The physical alteration was a strain on the entire system. The creative function and basis that has been distorted into the idea of aggression - the urge to act - was not understood. In a manner of speaking, breathing itself is a violence. The built-in inhibition resulted in a tied up system of mutual controls in which the necessary thrusting-out of action became literally impossible.

An overly conscientious, restrictive mental and physical state evolved, in which the organism's natural physical need for survival was in every way hampered. Mentally, the civilization progressed. Its technology was extremely activated, and propelled onward as it strove to develop, for example, artificial foods so that it would not need to kill for survival in any way.

At the same time it tried to leave the environment intact. It missed your stage of automobiles completely, and steam-driven vehicles, and concentrated rather early on sound. The sound could not be heard by physical ears.

The civilization was called Lumania, and the name itself went down in legend and was used again at a later time.

The Lumanians were a very thin, weakly people, physically speaking, but psychically either brilliant or completely ungifted. In some, you see, the built-in controls caused so many blockages of energy in all directions that even their naturally high telepathic abilities suffered.

They formed energy fields around their own civilization. They were, therefore, isolated from contact with other groups. They did not allow technology to destroy them, however. More and more of them realized that the experiment was not a success. Some, after physical death, left to join those from the previous successful civilization, who had migrated to other planetary systems within the physical structure.

Large groups, however, simply left their cities, destroyed the force fields that had enclosed them, and joined the many groups of relatively uncivilized peoples, mating with them and bearing children. These Lumanians died quickly, for they could not bear violence nor react to it violently. They felt however, that their mutant children might have a resulting disinclination toward violence, but without the prohibiting nerve-control reactions with which they were endowed.

Physically the civilization simply died out. Some few of the mutant children formed a small later group who traveled the area as itinerants in the following century, with large bands of animals. They cared for each other mutually, and many of the old legends concerning half-man and half-beast have come down through the ages simply from the memory of these old associations.

These people, as remnants, really, of the first great civilization, always carried within themselves strong subconscious memories of their origin. I am speaking of the

Lumanians now. This accounted for their quick rise, technologically speaking. But because their purpose was so single-minded - the avoidance of violence - rather, say, than the constructive peaceful development of creative potential, their experience was highly one-sided. They were driven by such a fear of violence that they dared not allow the physical system freedom even to express it.

The vitality of the civilization was therefore weak - not because violence did not exist, but because freedom of energy and expression was automatically blocked along specific lines, and from outside physically. They well understood the evils of violence in earthly terms, but they would have denied the individual's right to learn this his own way, and thus prevented the individual from using his own methods, creatively, to turn the violence into constructive areas. Free will in this respect was discarded.

As a child is physically protected from some diseases for a while after he emerges from his mother's womb, so for a brief period is the child cushioned against some psychic disasters for a short period after birth, and carries within him, still for his comfort, memories of past existences and places. So the Lumanians for some generations were supported by deep subconscious memories of the civilization that had gone before. Finally, however, these began to weaken. They had protected themselves against violence but not against fear.

They were, therefore, subject to all of the ordinary human fears which were then exaggerated, since physically they could not respond even to nature with violence. If attacked, they had to flee. The fight-or-flight principle did not apply. They had but one recourse.

Their god symbol was a male one - a strong, physically powerful male figure who would therefore protect them since they could not protect themselves. He evolved through the ages as their beliefs did, and into him they projected those qualities that they could not themselves express.

He was much later to appear as the old Jehovah, the God of Wrath who protected the Chosen People. The fear of natural forces was, therefore, initially extremely strong in them for the reasons given, and brought about a feeling of separation between man and those natural forces that nurtured him. They could not trust the earth, since they were not allowed to protect themselves against violent forces within it.

Their vast technology and their great civilization was largely underground. They were, in those terms, the original cavemen, and they came out from their cities through caves also. Caves were not just places of protection in which unskilled natives squatted. They were often doorways to and from the cities of the Lumanians. Long after the cities were deserted, the following natives, uncivilized, found these caves and the openings.

In the period that you now think of as the Stone Age, the men you think of as your ancestors, the cavemen, often found shelter not in rough naturally formed caves, but in mechanically created channels that reached behind them, and in the deserted cities in which once the Lumanians dwelled. Some of the tools fashioned by the cavemen were distorted versions of those they had found.

While the civilization of the Lumanians was highly concentrated, in that they made no attempt to conquer others or to spread out to any great extent in area, they did set out, over the centuries, outposts from which they could emerge and keep track of the other native peoples.

These outposts were constructed underground. From the original cities and large settlements there were, of course, underground connections, a system of tunnels, highly intricate and beautifully engineered. Since these were an aesthetic people, the walls were lined with paintings and drawings, and sculpture was also displayed along these inner byways.

There were various escalated systems, some conveying people on foot, some conveying goods. It was not practical to construct such tunnels to the many outposts, however, which were fairly small communities and relatively self-supporting; some were a good distance away from the main areas of commerce and activity.

These outposts were situated in many scattered areas, but there were a fairly large number of them in what is now Spain and the Pyrenees. There were several reasons for this, one having to do with the existence of rather giant-sized men in the mountain areas. Because of the timid nature of these [Lumanian] people, they did not enjoy out-post existence, and only the bravest and most confident of them were given such an assignment, which was temporary to begin with.

The caves, again, served as doorways opening outward, and often what seemed to be the back of a cave was instead constructed of a material opaque from the outside but transparent from the inside. The natives of the area, using such caves for natural shelter, could therefore be observed without danger. These people reacted to sounds that are not audible to your ears. Their peculiar fear of violence intensified all of their mechanisms to an amazing degree. They were forever alert and on guard.

This is difficult to explain, but they could mentally pitch a thought along certain frequencies - a highly distinguished art - and then translate the thought at a given destination in any of a number of ways, into form or color, for example, or even into a certain type of image. Their language was extremely discriminating in ways that you could not understand, simply because gradations in pitch, frequency, and spacing were so precise and complicated.

Communication, in fact, was one of their strongest points, and it was developed to such a high degree simply because they feared violence so deeply and were constantly on the alert. They banded together in large family groups, again in need for protection. Contact between children and parents was at a very high level, and children were acutely uncomfortable if out of the sight of their parents for any amount of tune.

For these reasons, those individuals who ran the outposts felt themselves to be in a very uncomfortable situation. They were limited in numbers and largely cut off from the main areas of their own civilization. They developed, therefore, an even greater telepathic activity, and a rapport with the earth above their head, so that the slightest tremor or footstep and the most minute movements above that were not usual, were instantly noted.

There were frequent peepholes, so to speak, through to the surface, from which they could make observations, and cameras situated there that kept the most precise pictures not only of the earth, but of the stars.

Of course, they had complete records of underground gas areas and intimate knowledge of the inner crusts, keeping careful watch upon and anticipating earth tremors and faults. They were as triumphant about their descent into the earth as any race ever was who left the earth.

This was, as I told you, the second, and perhaps most interesting of the three civilizations. The first followed generally your own line of development and faced many of the problems that you now do. They were largely situated in what you call Asia Minor, but they were also expansive and traveled outward to other areas. These are the people I mentioned earlier, who finally went on to other planets within other galaxies, and from whom the people of the Lumanian civilization came.

Before we discuss the third civilization, there are a few more points I would like to make about the second one.

This has to do with communication as it was applied to their drawings and paintings, and to the highly discriminating channels that their creative communications could take. In many ways their art was highly superior to your own, and not as isolated. The various art forms, for example, were connected in a fashion that is nearly unknown to you, and because you are so unfamiliar with the concept, it will be rather difficult to explain.

Consider, for example, something very simple - say a drawing of an animal. You would perceive it simply as a visual object, but these people were great synthesizers. A line was not simply a visual line, but according to an almost infinite variety of distinctions and divisions, it would also represent certain sounds that would be automatically translated.

An observer could automatically translate the sounds before he bothered with the visual image, if he wanted to. In what would appear to be a drawing of an animal, then, the entire history or background of the animal might also be given. Curves, angles, lines all represented, beside their obvious objective function in a drawing, a highly compli-cated series of variations in pitch, tone and value; or if you prefer, invisible words.

Distances between lines were translated as sound pauses, and sometimes also as distances in time. Color was used in terms of language in communication, in drawings and paintings; representing somewhat as your own color does, emotional gradations. The color however, its value of intensity, served to further refine and define - for exam-ple, either by reinforcing the message already given by the objective value of the lines, angles, and curves, and by the invisible word messages already explained; or by modifying these in any given number of ways.

The size of such drawings also spoke its own message. In one way this was a highly stylized art, and yet it allowed for both great preciseness of expression in terms of detail, and great freedom in terms of scope. It was obviously highly compressed. This technique was later discovered by the third civilization, and some of the remnants of drawings done in imitation of it still exist. But the keys to interpretation have been completely lost, so all you could see would be a drawing devoid of the multisensual elements that gave it such great variety. It exists, but you could not bring it alive.

I should perhaps mention here that some of the caves, particularly in certain areas of Spain and the Pyrenees, and some earlier ones in Africa, were artificial constructions. Now these people moved mass with sound, and, as I told you earlier, actually conveyed matter through a high mastery of sound. This is how their tunnels were originally formed, and it was also the method used to form some of the caves in areas where originally there were few. Often drawings on the cave walls were highly stylized information, almost like signs in your terms in front of public buildings, portraying the type of animals and beings in a given area.

These drawings later were used as models by your early cavemen in the historical times to which you usually refer.

Their communicative abilities, and therefore creative abilities, were more vital, alive, and responsive than yours are. When you hear a word you may be aware of a corresponding image in your mind. With these people, however, sounds automatically and instantly built up an amazingly vivid image that was not three-dimensional by any means, being internalized, but was far more vivid than your usual mental images indeed.

Certain sounds, again, were utilized to indicate amazing distinctions in terms of size, shape, direction, and duration both in space and time. Sounds automatically produced brilliant images, in other words. For this reason there was an easy distinction between what was called inner sight and outer sight, and it was quite natural for them to close their eyes when seated in conversation in order to communicate more clearly, enjoying the ever-changing and immediate inner images that accompanied any verbal interchange.

They learned quickly, and education was an exciting process, because this multisensuous facility automatically impressed information upon them not simply through one sense channel at a time but utilizing many simultaneously. For all this, however, and the immediacy of their perceptions, there was an inherent weakness. The inability to face up to violence and learn to conquer it meant, of course, that they also severely hampered a certain thrusting-out characteristic. Energy was blocked in these areas so that they actually lacked a forceful quality or sense of power.

I do not necessarily mean physical power however, but so much of their energy was used to avoid any meeting with violence that they were not able to channel ordinary aggressive feelings, for example, into other areas.

I have been speaking about the Lumanians in some detail because they are a part of your psychic heritage. The other two civilizations were in many ways more successful, and yet the strong intent behind the Lumanians' experiment was extremely volatile. While they were not able to solve the problem of violence as they understood it in your reality, their passionate desire to do so still rings throughout your own psychic environment.

Because of the true nature of "time" the Lumanians still exist as they were in your terms. There are often bleed-throughs in the psychic atmosphere. These do not occur by chance, but when some kind of rapport causes effects to leap between systems that otherwise appear quite separated. And so there have been such bleed-throughs between your own civilization and the Lumanians'.

Various old religions picked up the idea of the Lumanians' fierce god figure for example, in whom they managed to project their concepts of force, power, and violence, this god who had meant to protect them when nonviolence would not allow them to protect themselves.

There is a bleed-through now in the making, so to speak, in which the Lumanians' multidimensional concepts of art and communication will be glimpsed by your own people, but in a rudimentary form.

Because of the nature of probabilities there is also, of course, a system of reality in which the Lumanians succeeded in their experiment with nonviolence, and in which a completely different type of human being emerged.

All of this may seem very strange to you, simply because your concepts of existence are so specific and limiting. Ideas of probable realities and probable men and gods may strike some of you as quite absurd, and yet as you read this book, you are but one of the probable you's. Other probable you's would not consider you real, of course, and some might indignantly question your existence. Nevertheless, the probable system of reality is not just a philosophical question. If you are interested in the nature of your own reality, then it becomes a highly personal and pertinent matter.

As the various qualities of the Lumanians are still present in your psychic atmosphere, as their cities still coexist in land areas now called your own, so other probable identities coexist with the identities you now call your own. In the following chapter we will discuss you and your probable selves.

CHAPTER 16

PROBABLE SYSTEMS, MEN, AND GODS

In your daily life at any given moment of your time, you have a multitudinous choice of actions, some trivial and some of utmost importance. You may, for example, sneeze or not sneeze, cough or not cough, walk to the window or the door, scratch your elbow, save a child from drowning, learn a lesson, commit suicide, harm another, or turn your cheek.

It seems to you that reality is composed of those actions that you choose to take. Those that you choose to deny are ignored. The road not taken then seems to be a non-act, yet every thought is actualized and every possibility explored. Physical reality is constructed from what seems to be a series of physical acts. Since this is the usual criterion of reality for you, then nonphysical acts usually escape your notice, discretion, and judgment.

Let us take an example. You are reading this book when the telephone rings. A friend wants you to meet him at five o'clock. You stand considering. In your mind you see yourself (A) saying no and staying home, (B) saying no and going somewhere else instead, or (C) saying yes and keeping the engagement. Now all of these possible actions have a reality at that point. They are all capable of being actualized in Physical terms. Before you make your decision, each of these probable actions are equally valid. You choose one of these, and by your decision you make one event out of the three physical. This event is duly accepted as a portion of those serial happenings that compose your normal existence.

The other probable actions, however, are as valid as they ever were, though you have not chosen to actualize them physically. They are carried out as effectively as the one you chose to accept. If there was a strong emotional charge behind one of the rejected probable actions, it may even have greater validity as an act than the one you chose.

All actions are initially mental acts. This is the nature of reality. That sentence cannot be emphasized too thoroughly. All mental acts therefore are valid. They exist and cannot be negated.

Because you do not accept them all as physical events, you do not perceive their strength or durability. Your lack of perception cannot destroy their validity, however. If you wanted to be a doctor and are now in a different profession, then in some other probable reality you are a doctor. If you have abilities that you are not using here, they are being used elsewhere.

Now, again, these ideas may seem impossibly rich for your mental blood because of your propensity toward serial thought and three-dimensional attitudes.

Now these facts do not deny the validity of the soul, but instead add to it immeasurably.

The soul can be described for that matter, as a multidimensional, infinite act, each minute probability being brought somewhere into actuality and existence; an infinite creative act that creates for itself infinite dimensions in which fulfillment is possible.

The tapestry of your own existence is simply such that the threedimensional intellect cannot behold it. These probable selves, however, are a portion of your identity or soul, and if you are out of contact with them it is only because you focus upon physical events and accept them as the criteria for reality.

From any given point of your existence, however, you can glimpse other probable realities, and sense the reverberations of probable actions beneath those physical decisions that you make. Some people have done this spontaneously, often in the dream state. Here the rigid assumptions of normal waking consciousness often fade, and you can find yourself performing those physically rejected activities, never realizing that you have peered into a probable existence of your own.

If there are individual probable selves, then of course there are probable earths, all taking roads that you have not adopted. Beginning with an act of imagination in the waking state, you can sometimes follow for a short way into the "road not taken."

Go back to our man at the telephone, mentioned earlier. Let us say that he tells his friend he will not go. At the same time, if he imagines that he took another alternative and agreed on the engagement, then he might experience a sudden rift of dimensions. If he is lucky and the circumstances are good, he might suddenly feel the full validity of his acceptance as strongly as if he had chosen it physically. Before he realizes what is happening, he might actually feel himself leave his home and embark upon those probable actions that physically he has chosen not to perform.

For the moment, however, the full experience will rush upon him. Imagination will have opened the door and given him the freedom to perceive, but hallucination will not be involved. This is a simple exercise that can be tried in almost any circumstance, although solitude is important.

Such an experiment will not carry you too far, however, and the probable self who has chosen the action that you denied, is in important respects quite different from the self that you know. Each mental act opens up a new dimension of actuality. In a manner of speaking, your slightest thought gives birth to worlds.

This is not a dry metaphysical statement. It should arouse within you the strongest feelings of creativity and speculation. It is impossible for any being to be sterile, for any idea to die, or any ability to go unfulfilled.

Each probable system of reality of course then creates other such systems, and any one act, realized, brings forth an infinite number of "unrealized" acts that will also find their actualization. Now all systems of reality are open. The divisions between them are arbitrarily decided upon as a matter of convenience, but all exist simultaneously, and each one supports and adds to the other. So what you do is also reflected to some degree in the experience of your probable selves, and vice versa.

To the extent that you are open and receptive, you can benefit greatly by the various experiences of your probable selves, and can gain from their knowledge and abilities. Quite spontaneously, again, you often do this in the dream state, and often what seems to you to be an inspiration is a thought experienced but not actualized on the part of another self. You tune in and actualize it instead, you see.

Ideas that you have entertained and not used may be picked up in this same manner by other probable you's. Each of these probable selves consider themselves the real you, of course, and to any one of them you would be the probable self; but through the inner senses all of you are aware of your part in this gestalt.

The soul is not a finished product.

In fact it is not a product in those terms at all, but a process of becoming. All That Is is not a product, finished or otherwise, either. There are probable gods as there are probable men; but these probable gods are all a part of what you may call the soul of, or the identity of, All That Is; even as your probable selves are all a portion of your soul or entity.

The dimensions of actuality possible to All That Is of course far exceed those presently available to you. In a manner of speaking, you have created many probable gods through your own thoughts and desires. They become quite independent psychic entities, validities in other levels of existence. The one All That Is is aware not only of its own nature and of the nature of all consciousness, but is also aware of its infinite probable selves. We go here toward subjects in which words become meaningless.

The nature of All That Is can only be sensed directly through the inner senses, or, in a weaker communication, through inspiration or intuition. The miraculous complexity of such reality cannot be translated verbally.

Probabilities are an ever-present portion of your invisible psychological environment. You exist in the middle of the probable system of reality. It is not something apart from you. To some extent it is like a sea in which you have your present being. You are in it, and it is in you. Occasionally at surface levels of consciousness, you might wonder what might have happened had you made other decisions than those you have; chosen different mates, for example, or taken up residence in other portions of the country. You might wonder what would have happened had you mailed an important letter that you subsequently decided not to mail; and in such small wonderings only, have you ever questioned the nature of probabilities. But there are deep connections between yourself and all those individuals with whom you have had relationships, and with whom you were involved in deep decisions.

These are not nebulous. They are profound psychological interconnections that bind you each to each, particularly in a telepathic framework, though this may be beneath normal consciousness. The unrealized physical connections that might have occurred, but did not, are worked out in other layers of reality.

The invisible environment within your mind is not as lonely as you might think, and your seeming inner isolation is caused by the ego's persistent guard. It sees no reason, for example, why you should be informed of information that it does not consider pertinent to day-by-day daily activity.

I do not like the phrase, "to advance", yet in your terms "to advance" as a consciousness is to become more and more aware of these other materializations of your own identity. The probable selves are to gain awareness of the other probable selves, and realize that all are various manifestations of the true identity.

They are not "lost", buried or negated in some superself, without free will, self-determination, or individuality. Instead the identity is what they are, with full freedom to express all probable actions and developments, both in this reality and in others that you do not know.

As you sit reading this book in your present moment of time, you are positioned in the center of a cosmic web of probabilities that is affected by your slightest mental or emotional act.

Your thoughts and emotions, therefore, go forth from you not only in all physical directions but in directions that are quite invisible to you, appearing in dimensions that you would not presently understand. Now you are also the receiver of other such sig-nals coming from other probabilities that are connected with your own, but you choose which of those probable actions you want to make real or physical in your system, as others also have the freedom of choice in their systems.

You originate ideas then and receive them, but you are not forced to actualize unrealized probable acts that come to you from other probable selves. Now there is a natural attraction between yourself and other probable selves, electromagnetic connections having to do with simultaneous propulsions of energy. By this I mean energy that appears simultaneously both to you and probable selves in other realities; psychic connections having to do with a uniting, sympathetic, emotional reaction and a connection that shows up very strongly in the dream state.

In that state, with the functions of the ego somewhat stilled, there is some considerable communication between various portions of the entire identity. In dreams you may have glimpses of probable roads that you might have taken. You may think that these are fantasy, but instead you may be perceiving a legitimate picture of events that did occur within another system of probabilities.

One event can be actualized by more than one probable self, however, and you will resemble some probable selves more than others. Because you are involved in an intricate psychological gestalt such as this, and because the connections mentioned earlier do exist, you can avail yourself to some extent of abilities and knowledge possessed by these other probable portions of your personality.

The connections make for quite constant "bleed-throughs." Once you are aware of the probable system, however, you will also learn to become alert to what I will here call "benign intrusive impulses." Such impulses would seem to be disconnected from your own current interests or activities; intrusive in that they come quickly into consciousness, with a sense of strangeness as if they are not your own. These can often offer clues of various kinds. You may know absolutely nothing about music, for example, and one afternoon while in the middle of some mundane activity be struck by a sudden impulse to buy a violin.

Such an impulse could be an indication that another probable portion of your identity is gifted with that instrument. I am not telling you to run off and buy one, but you could however act on the impulse as far as is reasonably possible - renting a violin, simply acquainting yourself with violin concerti, etc.

You would learn the instrument far quicker, you see, if the impulse was originating with a probable self. It goes without saying then that probable selves exist in your "future" as well as your past. It is very poor policy to dwell negatively on unpleasant aspects of the past that you know, because some portions of the probable self may still be involved in that past. The concentration can allow greater bleed-through and adverse identification, because that part will be one background that you have in common with any probable selves who sprang from that particular source.

To dwell upon the possibility of illness or disaster is equally poor policy, for you set up negative webs of probabilities that need not occur. You can theoretically alter your own past as you have known it, for time is no more something divorced from you than probabilities are.

The past existed in multitudinous ways. You only experienced one probable past. By changing this past in your mind, now, in your present, you can change not only its nature but its effect, and not only upon yourself but upon others.

Pretend a particular event happened that greatly disturbed you. In your mind imagine it not simply wiped out, but replaced by another event of more beneficial nature. Now this must be done with great vividness and emotional validity, and many times. It is not a self-deception. The event that you choose will automatically be a probable event, which did in fact happen, though it is not the event you chose to perceive in your given probable past.

Telepathically, if the process is done correctly, your idea will also affect any people who were connected with the original event, though they can choose to reject as well as accept your version.

This is not a book on techniques, so I will not go into this particular method deeply, but merely mention it here. Remember, however, that in a most legitimate way many events that are not physically perceived or experienced are as valid as those that are, and are as real within your own invisible psychological environment.

There are in your terms, then, unlimited probable future events for which you are now setting groundworks. The nature of the thoughts and feelings you originate and those that you habitually or characteristically receive set a pattern, so you will choose from those probable futures those events that will physically become your experience.

Because there are bleed-throughs and interconnections, it is possible for you to tune into a "future event," say of an unfortunate nature, an event for which you are headed if you continue on your present course. A dream about it, for instance, may so frighten you that you avoid the event and do not experience it. If so, such a dream is a message from a probable self who did experience the event.

So can a child then in a dream receive such communications from a probable future self, of such a nature that its life is completely changed. The entire identity is being now. All divisions are merely illusions, so one probable self can hold out a helping hand to another, and through these inner communications the various probable selves in your terms begin to understand the nature of their identity.

Now this leads to other adventures in which whole civilizations may be involved, for as individuals have their probable destinies, so do civilizations, nations, and inhabited planetary systems. Your historical earth as you know it has developed in many different ways, and there is a deeply unconscious connection that unites all such manifestations.

In their own way, even atoms and molecules retain a knowledge of the forms through which they have passed, and so the individuals that compose any given civilization contain deep within themselves the inner knowledge of experiments and trials, successes and failures, in which the races have also been involved at other levels of reality.

In some probable realities, Christianity as you know it did not flourish. In some, males did not dominate. In others the makeup of physical matter simply followed different lines. Now all of these probabilities are in the air about you, so to speak, and I describe them as faithfully as I can, but I must relate them with concepts with which you are somewhat familiar. To some extent, then, the "truth" must be sifted through your own conceptual patterns in order for you to comprehend it at all.

Suffice it to say, you are surrounded by other influences and events. Certain of these you perceive in your three-dimensional reality. You accept them as real without realizing that they are only portions of other events. Where your vision fails, you think reality ceases, so again you must train yourselves to look between events, between objects, within yourself when you do not seem to be doing anything. Watch out for events that appear to make no sense, for they are often clues to larger invisible events.

The nature of matter itself is not understood. You perceive it at a certain "stage." Using your terms now and speaking as simply as possible, there are other forms of matter beyond those you see. These forms are quite real and vivid, quite "physical," to those who react to that particular sphere of activity.

In terms of probabilities, therefore, you choose certain acts, unconsciously transform these into physical events or objects, and then perceive them. But those unchosen events also go out from you and are projected into these other forms. Now the behavior of atoms and molecules is involved here, for again these are only present within your universe during certain stages. Their activity is perceived only during the range of particular vibratory rhythms. When your scientists examine them for example, they do not examine the nature, say, of an atom. They only explore the characteristics of an atom as it acts or shows itself within your system. Its greater reality completely escapes them.

You understand that there are spectrums of light. So are there spectrums of matter. Your system of physical reality is not dense in comparison with some others. The dimensions that you give to physical matter barely begin to hint at the varieties of dimensions possible.

Some systems are far heavier or lighter than your own, though this may not involve weight in the terms with which you are familiar. Probable actions emerge, then, into matter-systems quite as valid as your own, and quite as consistent. You are used to thinking in single-line thoughts, so you think of events that you know as complete things or actions, not realizing that what you perceive is but a fraction of their entire multidimensional existence.

In greater terms, it is impossible to separate one physical event from the probable events, for these are all dimensions of one action. It is basically impossible to separate the "you" that you know from the probable you's of which you are unaware, for the same reasons. There are always inner pathways, however, leading between probable events; since all of them are manifestations of an act in its becoming, then the dimensions between these are illusions.

The physical brain alone cannot pick up these connections with any great success. The mind, which is the inner counterpart of the brain, can at times perceive the far greater dimensions of any given event through a burst of sudden intuition or comprehension that cannot be adequately described on a verbal level.

As I have said frequently, time as you think of it does not exist, yet in your terms, time's true nature could be understood if the basic nature of the atom was ever made known to you. In one way, an atom could be compared to a microsecond.

It seems as if an atom "exists" steadily for a certain amount of time. Instead it phases in and out, so to speak. It fluctuates in a highly predictable pattern and rhythm. It can be perceived within your system only at certain points in this fluctuation, so it seems to scientists that the atom is steadily present. They are not aware of any gaps of absence as far as the atom is concerned.

In those periods of nonphysical projection, the off periods of fluctuation, the atoms "appear" in another system of reality. In that system they are perceived in what are "on" points of fluctuation, and in that system also then the atoms appear steadily. There are many such points of fluctuation, but your system of course is not aware of them, nor of the ultimate actions, universes, and systems that exist within them.

Now the same sort of behavior occurs on a deep, basic, secret, and unexplored psychological level. The physically oriented consciousness, responding to one phase of the atom's activity, comes alive and awake to its particular existence, but in between are other fluctuations in which consciousness is focused upon entirely different systems of reality; each of these coming awake and responding, and each one having no sense of absence, and memory only of those particular fluctuations to which they respond.

These fluctuations are actually simultaneous. It would seem to you as if there would be gaps between the fluctuations, and the description I have used is the best one for our purposes; but the probable systems all exist simultaneously, and basically, following this discussion, the atom is in all these other systems at one time.

Now we have been speaking in terms of fantastically swift pulses or fluctuations, so smooth and "brief" that you do not notice them. But there are also "slower," "more vast," "longer" fluctuations from your end of the scale.

These affect entirely different systems of existence than any closely connected with your own The experience of such kinds of consciousness is highly alien to you. One such fluctuation might take several thousand of your years, for example. These several thousand years would be experienced, say, as a second of your time, with the events occurring within it perceived simply as a "present period."

Now the consciousness of such beings would also contain the consciousness of large numbers of probable selves and systems, experienced quite vividly and clearly as multiple presents. These multiple presents can be altered at any of an actual number of infinite points; infinity not existing in terms of one indefinite line, but in terms of numberless probabilities and possible combinations growing out of each act of con-sciousness.

Such beings, with their multiple presents, may or may not be aware of your particular system. Their multiple present may or may not include it. You may be a part of their multiple present without even being aware of it. In much more limited terms your probable realities are multiple presents. The image, for an analogy, of an e-y-e within an eye within an eye, endlessly repeated, may be useful here.

CHAPTER 17

PROBABILITIES, THE NATURE OF GOOD AND EVIL, AND RELIGIOUS SYMBOLISM

Christian dogma speaks of the ascension of Christ, implying of course a vertical ascent into the heavens, and the development of the soul is often discussed in terms of direction. To progress is supposedly to ascend, while the horror of religious punishment, hell, is seen at the bottom of all things.

Development is therefore considered in a one-line direction only, in Christian terms. Seldom, for example, is it thought of in horizontal terms. The idea of evolution in its popular meaning promulgated this theory, as through gradual progression in a one-line direction, man emerged from the ape. Christ could just as well have disappeared sideways.

The inner reality of the message was told in terms that man at the time could understand, in line with his root assumptions. Development unfolds in all directions. The soul is not ascending a series of stairs, each one representing a new and higher point of development.

Instead, the soul stands at the center of itself, exploring, extending its capacities in all directions at once, involved in issues of creativity, each one highly legitimate. The probable system of reality opens up the nature of the soul to you. It should change current religion's ideas considerably. For this reason, the nature of good and evil is a highly important point.

On the one hand, quite simply and in a way that you cannot presently understand, evil does not exist. However, you are obviously confronted with what seem to be quite evil effects. Now it has been said often that there is a god, so there must be a devil - or if there is good, there must be evil. This is like saying that because an apple has a top, it must have a bottom - but without any understanding of the fact that both are a portion of the apple.

We go back to our fundamentals: You create reality through your feelings, thoughts, and mental actions. Some of these are physically materialized, others are actualized in probable systems. You are presented with an endless series of choices, it seems, at any point, some more or less favorable than others.

You must understand that each mental act is a reality for which you are responsible. That is what you are in this particular system of reality for. As long as you believe in a devil, for example, you will create one that is real enough for you, and for the others who continue to create him.

Because of the energy he is given by others, he will have a certain consciousness of his own, but such a mock devil has no power or reality to those who do not believe in his existence, and who do not give him energy through their belief. He is, in other words, a superlative hallucination As mentioned earlier, those who believe in a hell and assign themselves to it through their belief can indeed experience one, but certainly in nothing like eternal terms. No soul is forever ignorant.

Now those who have such beliefs actually lack a necessary deep trust in the nature of consciousness, of the soul, and of All That Is. They concentrate upon not what they think of as the power of good, but fearfully upon what they think of as the power of evil.

The hallucination is created, therefore, out of fear and of restriction. The devil idea is merely the mass projection of certain fears - mass in that it is produced by many people, but also limited in that there have always been those who rejected this principle.

Some very old religions understood the hallucinatory nature of the devil concept, but even in Egyptian times, the simpler and more distorted ideas became prevalent, particularly with the masses of people. In some ways, men in those times could not understand the concept of a god without the concept of a devil.

Storms, for example, are highly creative natural events, though they can also cause destruction. Early man could see only the destruction. Some intuitively understood that any effects are creative, despite their appearances, but few could convince their fellow men.

The light-and-darkness contrast presents us with the same kind of picture. The good was seen as light, for men felt safer in the day. The evil was therefore assigned to nightfall. Within the mass of distortions, however, hidden beneath the dogma there was always a hint of the basic creativity of every effect.

There are, then, no devils waiting to carry anyone off, unless you create them yourself, in which case the power resides in you and not in the mock devils. The Crucifixion and attendant drama made sense within your reality at the time. It arose into the world of physical actuality out of the inner reality from which your deepest intuitions and insights also spring.

The race brought forth the events, then, that would best convey in physical terms this deeper nonphysical knowledge of the indestructibility of the soul. This particular drama would not have made sense to other systems with different root assumptions than your own.

The symbolism of ascent or descent, or of light and dark, would be meaningless to other realities with different perceptive mechanisms. While your religions are built around an enduring kernel of truth, the symbolism used was craftily selected by the inner self in line with its knowledge of those root assumptions you hold as valid in the physical universe. Other information, in dreams for example, will also be given to you with the same symbolism, generally speaking. The symbolism itself, however, was simply used by the inner self. It does not inherently belong to inner reality.

Many probable systems have perceptive mechanisms far different from your own. In fact, some are based upon gestalts of awareness completely alien to you. Quite without realizing it, your ego is a result of group consciousness, for example; the one consciousness that most directly faces the exterior world, is dependent upon the minute consciousness that resides within each living cell of your body; and as a rule you are only aware of one ego - at least at a time.

In some systems the "individual" is quite aware of having more egos than one, in your terms. The entire psychological organization is in a way richer than your own. A Christ who was not aware of this would not appear in such a system, you see. There are kinds of perception with which you are not familiar, worlds in which your idea of light does not exist, where almost infinite gradations of thermal qualities are absorbed in terms of sensation, not of light.

In any of these worlds, the Christ drama could never appear as it appeared within your own. Now the same thing applies to each of your great religions, though as I have said in the past, the Buddhists come closer, generally speaking, to a description of the nature of reality. They have not understood the eternal validity of the soul, however, in terms of its exquisite invulnerability, nor been able to hold a feeling for its unique character. But Buddha, like Christ, interpreted what he almost knew in terms of your own reality. Not only of your own physical reality, but your own probable physical reality.

The methods, the secret methods behind all of the religions, were meant to lead man into a realm of understanding that existed apart from the symbols and the stories, into inner realizations that would take him both within and without the physical world that he knew. There are many manuscripts still not discovered, from old monasteries par-ticularly in Spain, that tell of underground groups within religious orders who kept these secrets alive when other monks were copying old Latin manuscripts.

There were tribes who never learned to write in Africa and Australia who also knew these secrets, and men called "Speakers" who memorized them and spread them upward, even throughout northern portions of Europe, before the time of Christ.

Offhand, the work involved could take five years, for there were several versions, and a group of leaders, each going in different directions, who taught their people. The world was far more ripe for Christianity than people suppose, because of these groups. The ideas were "buried" already throughout Europe.

Many important concepts were lost, however. The emphasis was on practical methods of living - quite simply - rules that could be understood, but the reasons for them were forgotten.

The Druids obtained some of their concepts from Speakers. So did the Egyptians. The Speakers predated the emergence of any religions that you know, and the religions of the Speakers arose spontaneously in many scattered areas, then grew like wildfire from the heart of Africa and Australia. There was one separate group in an area where the Aztecs dwelled at a later date, though the land mass was somewhat different then, and some of the lower cave dwellings at times were under water.

Various bands of the Speakers continued through the centuries. Because they were trained so well, the messages retained their authenticity. They believed, however, that it was wrong to set words into written form, and so did not record them. They also used natural earth symbols, but clearly understood the reasons for this. The Speakers, singly, existed in your Stone Age period, and were leaders. Their abilities helped the cavemen survive. There was little physical communication, however, in those days between the various Speakers, and some were unaware of the existence of the others.

Their message was as "pure" and undistorted as possible. It was for this reason however, through the centuries, that many who heard it translated it into parables and tales. Now, strong portions of Jewish scriptures carry traces of the message of these early Speakers, but even here, distortions have hidden the messages.

Since consciousness forms matter, and not the other way around, then thought exists before the brain and after it. A child can think coherently before he learns vocabulary - but he cannot impress the physical universe in its terms. So this inner knowledge has always been available, but is to become physically manifest - literally made flesh. The Speakers were the first to impress this inner knowledge upon the physical system, to make it physically known. Sometimes only one or two Speakers were alive in several centuries. Sometimes there were many. They looked around them and knew that the world sprang from their interior reality. They told others. They knew that the seemingly solid natural objects about them were composed of many minute consciousnesses.

They realized that from their own creativity they formed idea into matter, and that the stuff of matter was itself conscious and alive. They were intimately familiar with the natural rapport existing between themselves and their environment, therefore, and knew that they could alter their environment through their own acts.

Generally speaking, once a Speaker always a speaker, in your terms. In some incarnations, the abilities might be used so powerfully that all other aspects of the personality remained in the background. At other times the capacities might be timidly used. The Speakers possess an extraordinary vividness of feeling and thought pro-jection.

They can impress others with greater import through their communications. They can move from inner to outer reality with easy ability. They know instinctively how to use symbolism. They are highly creative on an unconscious level, constantly forming psychic frameworks beneath normal consciousness that can be used both by themselves and others in dream and trance states. They often appear to others in the dream condition, and they help dreamers in the manipulation of inner reality. They form images with which the dreamers can relate, images that can be used as bridges and then as gateways into kinds of consciousness more separated from your own.

The symbolism of the gods, the idea of the gods on Olympus, for example, the crossing-over point at the River Styx - that kind of phenomenon was originated by the Speakers. The symbolisms and frameworks of religion, therefore, had to exist not only in the physical world but also in the unconscious one. Outside of your own framework, houses as such or dwellings as such are not needed, and yet in trance encounters or dream encounters with other realities, such structures are frequently seen. They are transformations of data into terms that will be meaningful to you.

After death, for example, an individual may continue to create these - masses of individuals may - until they realize that the frameworks are no longer necessary. The Speakers were not confined in their activities, therefore, to waking consciousness. In all periods of your time they went about their duties both in the waking and sleep state. Much of the most pertinent information, in fact, was memorized by trainees during the dream condition, and passed on in the same manner. These unwritten manuscripts therefore were also illustrated, so to speak, by dream journeys or field trips into other kinds of reality. Such training still goes on. The particular psychic or story framework may vary. For example, conventional images of the Christian God and the saints may be utilized by the Speakers, with all of this highly vivid. The dreamer may find himself then in a magnificent harem, or instead in a brilliantly illuminated field or sky. Some Speakers confine their abilities to the dream state; and, waking, are largely unconscious of their own abilities or experience.

Now it is meaningless to call such dreams or dream places hallucinations, for they are representations of definite "objective" realities that you cannot perceive as yet in their own guise. The Egyptian religion was largely based upon the work of the Speakers, and great care was given to their training. The outward manifestations given to the masses of the people became so distorted, however, that the original unity of the religion finally decayed.

However, efforts were being made then to map inner reality in ways that have not been attempted since. It is true that in the dream state and in some other levels of existence close to your own, there is strong individual play in the creation of images, and a magnificent use of symbolism, but all of this takes place, again, in an "objective" definite environment, an environment whose characteristics make such phenomena possible - a field of activity, then, with its own rules. Now the Speakers are familiar with those rules, and often serve as guides. They have at times worked within organizations as in Egypt, where they worked through the temples and became involved with the power structures. As a rule, however, they are far more solitary.

Because of the true simultaneous nature of time, they are, of course, speaking to all of your ages at once through their various manifestations. On occasion they also serve as mediators, introducing to each other two incarnations of one personality, for example.

The rules within physical reality say that objects appear to be stationary and permanent. The rules of other realities are often far different, however. The nature of mental activities will follow different lines, and "continuity" in terms of time will not exist. Perceptual organization will exist by the use of different psychological groupings.

From the outside, such systems would seem meaningless to you even if you were able to perceive them. You would not be able to observe the pivot points about which actions occurred. The very definite rules of that system then would be quite obscure to you.

Now the Speakers are familiar with the rules within many systems. Still, however, most of these systems in larger terms are somewhat connected with your own kind of reality. There are an infinite number of inner universes. Only the very highest, most developed gestalt consciousness can be aware of anything like their totality. In this larger context, then, the Speakers must be called local. There is something like a chart mapping many of the nearby systems of reality, and I hope some day in your terms to make this available. In order to do so, Ruburt must be trained somewhat more intensely. There are points of coincidence where under certain conditions entry may be made from one of these systems to the other. They need not exist separately in space as you know it, of course.

These are called coordination points, where one camouflage merges into the other. Some of these are geographical in your system, but in all cases, a tuning-in of consciousness is a necessary preliminary. Such entries can only be made in an out-of-body condition. Each individual in his dreams has access to the information possessed by the Speakers. There are adjacent states of consciousness that occur within the sleep pattern, that cannot be picked up by your EEG's - adjacent "corridors" through which your consciousness travels.

The higher centers of intuition are activated while physically oriented portions of consciousness remain with the body. The "absent" portion of the self cannot be traced through brain patterns, though the point of its departure and the point of its return may show a particular pattern. The "time out" itself, however, will not be detected in any way, the tracings showing only whatever characteristic pattern was being given immediately before departure.

Now this happens in every night's sleep. Two areas of activity are involved, one very passive and one acutely active. In one state this portion of consciousness is passive, receiving information. In the next stage it is active as it takes part through action - the concepts given it are then vividly perceived through participation and examples. This is the most protected area of sleep. The rejuvenating characteristics enter in here, and it is during this period that the Speakers act as teachers and guides.

This information is, then, often interpreted on return by other layers of the self such as the body consciousness and subconscious, where it is formed into dreams that will have meaning to these areas of the self and where general teaching, for example, may be translated into practical advice involving a particular matter.

There are several very definite stages of sleep, and they all perform various services for the personality. They are also signals for different layers of consciousness, realization, and activity. They are accompanied by some physical variations, and there are some variations having to do with age.

In our next chapter I will speak of these in some detail. For now it is sufficient to realize that specific steps, definite alterations, occur as consciousness is shifted from the exterior to the interior reality, and that these changes are not random; that consciousness leaves through a very predictable route to its many destinations. Through the ages the Speakers have taught dreamers how to manipulate in these other environments. They have taught them how to bring back information that could be used for the good of the present personality. According to the intent, present purpose, and development, an individual may be aware of these travels to varying degrees. Some have excellent recall, for example, but often misinterpret their experience because of conscious ideas.

It is very possible for one dreamer who is a Speaker, to go to the aid of another individual who is having some difficulties in an inner reality within the dream state. The idea of guardian angels of course is highly connected here. A good Speaker is as effective within one reality as he is within the other, creating psychic frameworks within physical reality as well as within interior environments. Many artists, poets, and musicians are Speakers, translating one world in terms of another, forming psychic structures that exist in both with great vitality - structures that may be perceived from more than one reality at once.

There are also various states of consciousness in waking life, upon which you do not focus, and of which you are usually quite unaware. Each state knows its own conditions and is familiar with a different kind of reality.

"You" presently have a once-centered consciousness, in that "you" close off from your experience these other stages of consciousness in which other portions of your entire identity are intimately involved. These other stages of consciousness create their own realities as you create your own. The realities are, therefore, byproducts of consciousness itself. If you could become aware of these, they might appear to be other places to you, rather than realms or fields of different kinds of activities. If you probe into these realms you will be forced to perceive them with the root assumptions of your own system, translating feelings of warmth and comfort, for example, into images of warm shelters or buildings, or feelings of fear into images of demons.

On occasion even in waking life a personality may spontaneously shift gears, so to speak, and suddenly find itself for a second or perhaps a few moments within another such realm. Disorientation usually occurs. There are those who do this quite deliberately with training, but often they do not realize that they are interpreting the experiences they have with the values of their "home" consciousness.

All of this is not as esoteric as it might seem. Almost every individual has had bizarre experiences with consciousness, and knows intuitively that their greater experience is not limited to physical reality. Most dreams are like animated postcards brought back from a journey that you have returned from and largely forgotten. Your consciousness is already oriented again to physical reality; the dream, an attempt to translate the deeper experience into recognizable forms. The images within the dream are also highly coded, and are signals for underlying events that are basically not decipherable.

The Speakers help you in the formation of dreams which are indeed multidimensional artistic productions of a kind - dreams existing in more than one reality, with effects that dissect various stages of consciousness that are real, in your terms, to both the living and the dead and in which both the living and the dead may participate. It is for this reason that inspirations and revelations are so often a part of the dream condition.

Divorced from physical focus, you are in a better position to hear the Speakers, to translate their instructions, to practice with the creation of images, and to be guided in the methods of maintaining the health of the physical body. In the most protected areas of sleep, the apparent barriers between many layers of reality vanish. You are aware, for example, of some probable realities. You choose which probable acts you want to actualize in your system. You follow other probable acts through in the dream state. You do this individually, but you also do it en masse on national and global levels.

Consciousness at different levels or stages perceives different kinds of events. In order to perceive some of these you have only to learn to change the focus of your attention from one level to another. There are minute chemical and electromagnetic alterations that accompany these stages of consciousness, and certain physical changes within the body itself in hormone production and pineal activity.

You usually glide from wakefulness through to sleep without ever noticing the various conditions of consciousness through which you pass, yet there are several. First, of course, with various degrees of spontaneity, there is the inward turn of consciousness away from physical data, from worries and concerns of the day. Then there is an undifferentiated level between wakefulness and sleep where you act as a receiver - passive but open, in which telepathic and clairvoyant messages come to you quite easily.

Your consciousness can seem to float. There are varying physical sensations, sometimes of growing large, sometimes of falling. Both sensations are characteristic of moments in which you almost catch yourself, almost become aware of this undifferentiated area, and then translate some of its experiences into physical terms. The sensation of largeness, for example, is a physical interpretation of the psychic expansion. The feeling of falling is an interpretation of a sudden return of consciousness to the body.

This period can last for only a few moments, for half an hour, or can be returned to. It is a cushioning, supportive, and expansive stage of consciousness. Suggestions given during this time are highly effective. Following this period there is an active state, that can occur, of pseudodreaming, where the mind busies itself with physical concerns that have managed to cling through the first two stages.

If these are too vigorous, the individual may awaken. This is a vivid, intense, but usually brief stage. Another undifferentiated layer follows, this time marked quite definitely by voices, conversations, or images, as consciousness tunes in more firmly to other communications. Several of these may compete for the individual's attention. At this point the body is fairly quiet. The individual will follow one or another of these inner stimuli to a deeper level of consciousness, and form into light dreams the communications he is receiving.

Somewhere during this time he will go into a deeply protected area of sleep, where he is at the threshold to other layers of reality and probabilities. At this point his experiences will be out of all context to time as you know it. He may experience years though only minutes have passed. He will then return toward physical reality in an area marked as REM sleep by your scientists, where physically oriented dream productions will be created, putting the knowledge he has gained into use. The cycle would then be repeated. Almost the same kinds of fluctuations and stages occur even when you are waking, however, though you are even less aware of them because then the egotistical self acts quite purposefully to blanket out these other areas of experience.

The precise stages are present beneath waking awareness, however, and with the same chemical, electromagnetic, and hormonal fluctuations. You simply are not aware of what your consciousness is doing. You cannot yourselves keep track of it for five full moments of your time. The dimensions of it can only be sensed by those determined enough to take the time and effort required to journey through their own subjective realities. Yet intuitively each individual knows that a part of his experience escapes from him all the time. When you suddenly cannot remember a name that you should know, you have in essence the same kind of feeling of which you are always subconsciously aware.

The purpose of the Speakers is to help you correlate and understand this multidimensional existence, and to bring as much as possible of it to your conscious attention. Only by learning to feel, or sense, or intuitively perceive the depths of your own experience can you glimpse the nature of All That Is. By becoming more aware of your consciousness as it operates in physical life, you can learn to watch it as it manipulates through these other less familiar areas. Probable realities are only probable to you because you are not aware of them.

These stages of consciousness are all a part of your own reality. A knowledge of them can be most useful. You can learn to "shift gears," stand aside from your own experience, and examine it with much better perspective. You can prepare questions or problems, suggesting that they be solved for you in the sleep state. You can suggest that you will speak with distant friends, or convey important messages that you cannot convey verbally, perhaps. You can bring about reconciliations, for example, at another layer of reality though you cannot do so in this one.

You can direct the healing of your body, telling yourself that this will be accomplished by you at one of the other levels of sleep consciousness, and you may ask for the aid of a Speaker to give you any necessary psychological guidance that is needed to maintain health. If you have particular conscious goals and if you are reasonably certain that they are beneficial ones, then you can suggest dreams in which they occur, for the dreams themselves will hasten their physical reality.

Now unconsciously you do many of these things. You often go back In time, so to speak, and "relive" a particular event so that it has a different ending, or say things that you wish you had said. A knowledge of one state of consciousness can help you in other states. In a light trance the meaning of dream symbols will be given if you ask for them. The symbols may then be used as methods of suggestion that will be tailored for you personally. If you discover, say, that a fountain in a dream represents refreshment, then when you are tired or depressed, think of a fountain. In another layer of reality, of course, you will be creating one.

In the most protected areas of sleep you are dealing with experience that is pure feeling or knowing, and disconnected from both words or images. As mentioned, these experiences are translated into dreams later, necessitating a return to areas of consciousness more familiar with physical data. Here a great creative synthesis and a great creative diversification takes place, in which any given dream image has meaning to various layers of the self - on one level representing a truth you have lived and on other levels representing this truth as it is more specifically applied to various areas of experience or problems. There will be a metamorphosis, therefore, of one symbol turning into many, and the conscious mind may only perceive a chaos of various dream images, because the inner organization and unity is partially hidden in the other areas of consciousness through which the reasoning mind cannot follow.

The unconscious and subconscious areas, however, are aware of much more of this information than the ego, for it receives only the minute residue of dream material as a rule. The Speakers therefore may appear within dreams as historical characters, as prophets, as trusted old friends, or in whatever guise will impress the particular personality.

In the original experience, however, the true nature of the Speaker is apparent. The production of dreams is as "sophisticated" an endeavor as is the production of the objective life of a given individual. It is simply living on different terms.

These various stages of consciousness and fluctuations of psychic activity can also be examined through direct experience from the waking state. In the following chapter we will let you become more aware of these ever-active portions of your own reality.

CHAPTER 18

VARIOUS STAGES OF CONSCIOUSNESS, SYMBOLISM, AND MULTIPLE FOCUS

Within your own personality all facets of your consciousness converge, whether or not you are aware of it.

Consciousness can be turned in many directions, obviously, both inward and outward. You are aware of fluctuations in your normal consciousness, and closer atten-tion would make some of this quite clear. You expand or narrow the scope of your attention constantly. You may focus upon one object almost to the exclusion of everything else at times, so that you literally are not conscious of the room in which you sit.

You may be "conscious" and reacting to a remembered event so strongly that you are relatively unaware of present events. You take all of these fluctuations for granted. They do not disturb you. If you are Lost in a book and unaware momentarily of your immediate environment, you are not afraid that it will be gone when you want to turn your attention back to it. Nor in a daydream do you usually worry about returning safely to the present moment.

To some extent, all of these are small examples of the mobility of your consciousness, and the ease with which it can be used. In a strange manner, symbols can be regarded as samples of the way you perceive it various levels of consciousness. Their changing guises can be used as signposts. Fire, for example, is a symbol made physical, so a real fire tells you obviously that you are perceiving reality with your physically attuned consciousness.

A mental picture of a fire automatically tells you that another kind of consciousness is involved. A fire mentally seen that has warmth but does not burn destructively obviously means something else. All symbols are an attempt to express feelings, feelings that can never be expressed adequately through language. Symbols represent the infinite variations of feelings, and in various stages of consciousness these will appear in different terms, but they will always accompany you.

There are several exceptions, however, in which pure knowing or pure feeling is involved without the necessity for symbols. These stages of consciousness are infrequent and seldom translated into normal conscious terms.

Let us take a particular feeling and follow it through as it might be expressed at various levels of consciousness. Begin with a feeling of joy. In normal consciousness, the immediate environment will be perceived in a far different manner than it would be, say, if an individual were in a state of depression. The feeling of joy changes the objects themselves, in that the perceiver sees them in a far brighter light. He creates the objects far more vividly and with greater clarity. In feedback fashion, the environment then seems to reinforce his joy. What he sees, however, is still physical, the objects of the material world. Pretend now that he begins to daydream and falls into a reverie. Into his inner mind come pictures or symbols of material objects, people or events, from perhaps the past as well as present and future imaginings, the joy now being expressed with greater freedom mentally, but with symbols.

The joy stretches out, so to speak, into the future, sheds also its light into the past, and may cover greater areas of expansion than could be shown in physical terms at that moment. Now imagine that our individual from his reverie falls either into a trance state or into a deep sleep. He may see images that are highly symbolic to him of joy or exuberance. Logically there may be little connection between them, but intuitively the connections are clear. He now enters into his mental experiences far more deeply than in the reverie state, and may have a series of dream episodes in which he is able to express his joy and share it with others.

He is still dealing with physically oriented symbols, however. Now since we are using this discussion as a case in point we will continue to follow it even further. He may form images of dream cities or people that are of a very joyful nature, translate the emotion itself into whatever symbols are pertinent to him. An exuberance may be translated into images of playing animals, flying people, or animals or landscapes of great beauty. Again, the logical connections will be lacking, but the entire episode will be connected by this emotion.

The physical body all the while is greatly benefitted, because the beneficial feelings automatically renew and replenish its recuperative abilities. The feelings of joy now may lead to images of Christ, Buddha, or the prophets. These symbols are the changing scenes characteristic of consciousness at various stages. The experiences are to be considered as creations; creative acts all native to consciousness at various stages.

Beyond this are states in which the symbols themselves begin to fade away, become indistinct, distant. Here you begin to draw into regions of consciousness in which symbols become less and less necessary, and it is a largely unpopulated area indeed. Representations blink off and on, and finally disappear. Consciousness is less and less physically oriented. In this stage of consciousness the soul finds itself alone with its own feelings, stripped of symbolism and representations, and begins to perceive the gigantic reality of its own knowing.

It feels direct experience. If we use joy as our example, all mental symbols and images of it would finally disappear. They had emerged from it, and would fall away from it, not being the original experience, but by-products. The soul would then begin to explore the reality of this joy in terms that can hardly be explained, and in so doing would learn methods of perception, expression, and actualization that would have been utterly incomprehensible to it before.

Physical objects are the most obvious of your symbols, and precisely for that reason you do not realize that they are symbols at all.

At different levels, consciousness works with different kinds of symbols. Symbols are a method of expressing inner reality. Working in one direction the soul, using its consciousness, expresses inner reality through as many symbols as possible, through living, changing symbolism. Each symbol itself then is to its own extent conscious, individual, and aware.

In so doing, the soul continually creates new varieties of inner reality to be explored. Working in the opposite direction, so to speak, the soul divests itself of all symbols, all representations, and using its consciousness in a different way learns to probe its own direct experience. Without symbols to come between it and experience, it perfects itself in a kind of value fulfillment that you presently cannot understand except symbolically.

Now these efforts go on whether you wake or sleep. Once you are aware of these activities, however, it is possible to catch yourself in various stages of consciousness, and even at times to follow your own progress, particularly through dream states. Your body is your most intimate symbol at this point, and again your most obvious.

You will use the idea of a body in most stages of consciousness. When you leave your physical body in any kind of out-of-body experience, you actually leave it in another that is only slightly less Physical. This in turn is "later" discarded for one still less physical, but the idea of the form is so important a symbol that you carry it through all of your religious literature, and stories of hereafter.

At one point it will vanish with the other symbols. Now there was a time, speaking in your terms, before the making of symbols; a time so divorced from your idea of reality that only in the most protected areas of sleep does any memory of it ever return. It seems to you that without symbols there would be nonbeing, but this is a natural enough deduction since you are so symbol-oriented.

Those stages of consciousness that occur after death still all deal with symbols, though there is much greater freedom in their use, and greater understanding of their meaning. But in higher stages of consciousness, the symbols are no longer necessary, and creativity takes place completely without their use.

Obviously you cannot become aware of that stage of consciousness now, but you can keep track of the way symbols appear to you in both waking life and the dream state, and learn to connect them with the feelings they represent. You will learn that certain symbols will appear personally to you at various stages of consciousness, and these can serve as points of recognition in your own explorations. When Ruburt is about to leave his body from the dream state for example, he will often find himself in a strange house or apartment that offers opportunities for exploration.

The houses or apartments will always be different, and yet the symbol is always a signpost that he has reached a particular point of consciousness, and is ready to enter another state of consciousness. Each of you will have certain symbols that serve the same kind of purpose, highly individual to you. Unless you make an effort at self-exploration, however, these symbolic guideposts will make no conscious sense.

Some such symbols stay with you for life. Some in periods of great change may also alter their character, bringing forth a certain feeling of disorientation as these unconsciously familiar symbols undergo transformation. The same sort of thing applies to your physical living. A dog may be a symbol to you of natural joy, for example, or of freedom. After seeing an accident in which a dog is killed, then dogs may mean something entirely different to you.

This of course is obvious, but the same sort of symbol changing may occur within dreams. The dog's accident may be a dream experience, for that matter, that then changes your conscious symbolic feeling toward dogs in the waking state. One person may symbolize fear as a demon, as an unfriendly animal, or even as some perfectly simple ordinarily harmless object; but if you know what your own symbols mean, then you can use the knowledge not only to interpret your dreams but also as signposts to the state of consciousness in which they usually occur.

These symbols will change, therefore, in various stages of consciousness. Again, the logical sequence is not present, but the intuitive creation will change the symbols much in the way that an artist might change his colors.

All symbols stand for inner realities, therefore, and when you juggle symbols, you are juggling inner realities. Any exterior move that you make is made within the interior environment, within all the interior environments with which you are involved.

Symbols are highly charged psychic particles and that includes physical objects that have strong characteristics of attraction and expansion, that stand for inner realizations and realities that have not been perceived through direct knowing. (By direct knowing here, I mean instant cognition and comprehension, without symbolization.)

Even the symbols, then, at various stages of consciousness will appear differently, some seeking to have stability and permanence as your physical objects, following the principles or root assumptions of corporeal reality, and some changing much more quickly, as in the dream state, these being more immediate and sensitive indicators of feeling. Various states of consciousness seem to have their own environments in which these symbols appear, again, as objects appear in a physical environment.

Seemingly nonstable mental objects appear in the dream environment at certain levels. The symbols follow rules then in both cases. As mentioned earlier, again, the dream universe is as "objective" as the corporeal one. The objects and symbols within it are as faithful representations of dream life as physical objects are of waking life.

The nature of the symbol, therefore, can serve as an indication not only as to your environment but your state of consciousness within it. In normal dreaming within the context of an ordinary dream drama, the objects seem permanent enough to you. You take them for granted. You are still physically oriented. You project upon dream images the symbolism of your waking hours.

In other states of dream consciousness, however, houses may suddenly disappear. A modern building may suddenly replace a shack. A child may turn into a tulip. Now the symbols are obviously behaving in a different manner. In this environment, permanency is not a root assumption. Logical sequence does not apply.

Symbols that behave in this way can be clues to you that you are now at another stage of consciousness, and within an entirely different interior environment. Expression of feelings and of experiences are not limited to the rigid framework of objects stuck into consecutive moments. Feelings are automatically transformed and expressed in a new, mobile, immediate manner. In a way the tune of consciousness is quicker.

Actualization does not need to wait for hours or days. Experience is free from a time context. In this realm of consciousness an entire book may be written, or one's life plans thoroughly scrutinized. Your present time is one of many dimensions that help form this particular stage of consciousness. Therefore your past, present and future exist within it, but only as portions of that interior environment. You have to learn your way about, for the states of consciousness and their environment stretch out in their own way as your world stretches out, say, in space. It is not difficult, however, to be aware of yourself in this stage through giving yourself proper suggestions before sleep.

To some extent this transmutation of symbol can be observed in various stages of waking consciousness also. When you are at rest, awake but with eyes closed, images and pictures will often appear to your inner eye. Some will be physical-like materializations, images of trees or houses or people. Others will be simply shapes that change swiftly and seem to flow one into the other. As a rule, even the images that are recognizable will quickly be replaced by others in a kaleidoscope of constantly changing forms.

There may seem to you to be no logic to these inner pictures, and certainly no connection between them and what you were thinking a moment before, or even an hour before. To some extent they seem disconnected from you and not of your doing. Often, however, they represent the characteristics shown by consciousness when it is somewhat turned away from physical stimuli. The form of symbols is changed as the states of consciousness change.

The images that you see in this circumstance represent the thoughts and feelings experienced just before you closed your eyes, or those that were paramount in your mind somewhat previously. The minute your eyes are closed, the thoughts and feelings express themselves through this symbolism. Because the images may seem to have no direct connection logically to these thoughts and feelings, you do not recognize them either as your own, nor are you able to tie them up with what they represent.

I am putting this rather simply here. Imaginatively you have greater freedom to express feelings than you do practically. An earlier particular fear felt during the day involving, say, a loss of a job may then be translated when you close your eyes into a series of seemingly unrelated symbols, all however connected to that one fear.

You may see in a quick series of pictures a deep hole in the ground. It may be replaced by a street urchin, obviously poor and from another century. A casket may appear, or a black wallet fly through the air. You may see a severe, dark, wintry scene. The picture of a character from an old book long forgotten may appear and disappear. In between may be a grouping of opposing symbols, representing your hope - a spring flower, a table loaded with food, a new suit of clothes, any sign of abundance that would have meaning to you. Nowhere would the thought of the potential loss of a job enter in.

It would seem to you that you had forgotten it.

Through the use of symbols, however, your feelings would be given full play, each image rising and falling in flow with feelings so far underneath consciousness - pools of emotion - that you were not aware of them. They would automatically bring about these images however. Now with reflection you could connect these with their origin, but usually they would pass you by.

If you let yourself lie still longer with eyes closed, the symbolism would continue to change character, losing perhaps some of its visual characteristics and growing more intense in other directions. You might think you smell a particular odor, for example, that is distasteful to you (following through with the situation as given). You might, instead, translate the fear into a frightening physical sensation, and suddenly feel that you are falling, or that something unpleasant touched you.

Any of these changing characteristics of symbols should alert you to the altered state of your consciousness. If you let yourself drift off into sleep here, you would most probably manufacture two or three dreams that symbolized the fear, dreams in which you consider and try out possible solutions within the dream context. The job situation might never appear as such within any of the dreams, of course.

Still, to the unconscious the problem has been set and given. In the following deep protected areas of sleep, the higher centers of the inner self are allowed to function and come to the aid of the three-dimensionally oriented portion of the personality. This more liberated self sees the situation much more clearly, suggests a given line of action (but does not order it), and informs the dreaming self. The dreaming self then manufactures a group of dreams in which the solution is stated within a symbolic dream situation.

The final and more specific interpretation is done in areas of dreaming closer to the waking self, when the symbols grow more and more specific. There is a much more narrow aspect to symbolism, therefore: The closer you get to waking consciousness, the more limited and narrow the symbol. The handier it is in a given physical circumstance, the less valuable it is as a waking lifetime characteristic symbol.

To some extent the more precise a symbol is, the less meaning it can contain. In the most important dream work, done in the deep protected sleep periods, the symbols are powerful enough and yet condensed enough so that they can be broken down, used in a series of seemingly unrelated dreams as connectives, retain their original strength and still appear in different guises, becoming in each succeeding dream layer more and more specific.

Now even as you go about your day, your consciousness fluctuates, and you can catch yourself "symbolizing" in these different ways if you get in the habit of observing but not interpreting the state of your mind. Each physical event that has happened to you is filed away within your psyche as a definite group of symbols. These do not represent the experience, they contain the experience. These represent your personal symbol bank as far as your present life is concerned.

There is a great unity between your daytime symbols and your dreaming ones. In a miraculous shorthand, many symbols carry the burden of far more than one experience, of course, and one symbol will therefore evoke not only one given experience, but similar ones. Personal association, therefore, is highly involved with your personal bank of symbols, and it operates in the dream states precisely as In waking life - but with greater freedom, and drawing from the future, in your terms, as well as from the past.

Therefore, you have greater use of symbolism in the dream state, for you are aware of past and future symbols. These vary in intensity; Often they cluster together. Such multidimensional symbols will appear then in many ways, not simply visually. They will affect not only your own Physical reality, but all realities in which you are involved. In a manner f speaking the symbols that you know are but the tail end of greater symbols.

Resume dictation. When I referred to your personal bank of symbols, I meant to specify that this bank was yours from the day of your birth and before. It contained the symbols of your past existences in your terms (and in your terms, you add to it in this life). This bank of symbols must be activated, however. For example, you have visual images when you are born, internal visual images, symbols that are activated the moment you open your eyes for the first time. These serve you as learning mechanisms. You keep trying to utilize your eyes properly until exterior images conform with the inner patterns. This is extremely important, and not understood by your scientists.

The eye-opening activates the inner mechanism. If there is something wrong physically with the eyes, if they are blind for example, then that particular mechanism is not activated at that time. The personality may have chosen to be born blind for his own reasons. If those reasons change, or if inner psychic developments occur, then the physical eyes will be healed and the inner mechanism activated. There are endless varieties of behavior along these lines. The inner banks of symbols, however, operate as a drawing account, latent unless you take advantage of them. You think before you learn language, as I mentioned earlier in this book, but you already have at your psychic fingertips past experiences from other lifetimes to guide you.

Those who are born into the same nationality, say twice consecutively, learn to speak much quicker the second time around. Some infants will think in the language of a past life before the new language is learned. All of this has to do with the use of symbols.

Sound is itself a symbol. You understand that from a given point of silence, sound begins and grows louder. What you do not understand is that from that given point of silence, which is your point of non-perception, sounds also begin that grow deeper and deeper into silence, yet still have meaning and as much variety as the sounds that you know, and these are also symbols. The thought unspoken has a "sound" that you do not hear, but that is very audible at another level of reality and perception.

Trees as they stand are a sound that, again, you do not perceive. In your dreams and particularly beyond those dreams that you recall, are areas of consciousness in which these sounds are automatically perceived and translated into visual images. They operate as a sort of shorthand. Given certain sounds, you could recreate your universe as you know it unconsciously, and any one multidimensional symbol can contain all the reality that you know.

Physically, smell, sight, and sound are combined together to give you your main sense data and compose your physical senses. At other levels, however, these are separated. Odors therefore have a visual reality, and, as you know, visual data can also be perceived in terms of other sense perceptions.

The symbols can come together or fly apart, can be perceived separately or as a unity. As each event has its own symbol for you, so you have your characteristic way of combining these. These symbols can be translated and perceived in many terms; as a series of notes for example, as a combination of senses, as a series of images. At various stages of consciousness you will perceive the symbols in different terms. The multidimensional symbol in its entirety, then, has a reality in other states of consciousness, but also at other levels of reality entirely.

You operate as if your thoughts were secret, though you should know by now that they are not. Not only are your thoughts apparent through telepathic communications, for example, but without your conscious awareness they also form what you may call pseudoimages "beneath" the range of physical matter as you normally perceive it in some cases, or "above" this same range.

It is, therefore, as if your thoughts appear within other realities as objects - alive and vital in themselves, growing into other systems as flowers or trees grow up seemingly from nothing within physical reality. These can then be used as the raw material, so to speak, in certain other systems. They are the given "natural data," the raw material of creativity in the realities that you help seed but do not perceive.

In this manner of speaking, your thoughts then follow laws. Their behavior follows laws, and their activities, that you do not understand, though you call your thoughts your own. They are then manipulated, independently of you, by other kinds of consciousness as ever-changing natural phenomena. The native consciousness within such systems is not aware of the origin of this phenomena, nor of your own reality. They take the evidence that appears to their senses as reality, as most of you do. It would not occur to them that this phenomenon originated outside of their own system.

If I were to make the same statement for example to any of my readers, I would be accused of saying that physical reality was composed of the discards of the universe.

I am not saying that, nor implying it in the case just mentioned. In your system you have a direct hand in the formation of physical reality. Your natural given data is the result of individual, mass, and collective thoughts, feelings, and emotions, materialized. Your system in this respect is more creative than the systems just mentioned. On the other hand, within these other systems there is a strong innovative group consciousness developing, in which identity is retained but greater inner play allowed between individuals, a large creative interchange of symbol-pools, a drawing upon mental and psychic symbols with greater facility. Because of this, these individuals recognize more clearly the connection between creative images and given sense data. They purposely alter and change their given sense data, and experiment with it.

All of this involves a working with symbols in a most intimate manner. At certain levels of your personality you are aware of all the different ways in which symbols are used, not only in your system but in others. As mentioned earlier, no system of reality is closed. Your thoughts and images and feelings therefore alter the given sense data in some other systems.

The innovative patterns developed in those systems, however, can be to some extent perceived within your own. There are constant bleed-throughs. In your various stages of consciousness you pass through areas that can be correlated with many of these systems. Some stages through which you pass are native stages to other kinds of consciousness, and while passing through these you will find yourself using symbols in the way that is characteristic of that level.

Symbols should be fluid, ever-changing in their form. Some -an be used as casements to house original experiences, as methods of deception therefore rather than illumination. When this happens fear is always involved.

Fear taken into the various stages of consciousness acts as a distorting lens, hiding the natural dimensions of all symbols, acting as a barrier and as an impediment to free flow. Symbols of an explosive nature serve as releasing agents, setting loose that which has been encased. Without physical storms you would all go insane.

The aggressive nature of symbols is little understood, nor the relationship between aggression and creativity. These are far from opposing characteristics, and without an aggressive thrust, symbols would lack their high mobility. They would exist in a permanent kind of environment.

It is both the creative and aggressive aspects of consciousness that allow it to use symbols, to move through various levels of experience, and the aggressive nature of thought that so propels it, despite your knowledge, into realities that you do not understand.

Aggressiveness and passivity are both behind symbols of birth, for both are needed. They are both beneath symbols of death, though this is not understood. Inertia results when aggressiveness and creativity are not in the proper proportions, when consciousness leans too severely in one direction or another, when the flow of symbols is either too quick or too slow for the particular psychological environment in which you dwell.

Pauses then occur. To put it as simply as possible, there is an almost inconceivable moment in which a no-reality occurs, in which a symbol is caught between motion and no motion, a time of uncertainty. This is of course translated in many ways, and reflected. In such periods, certain symbols can be lost to all intents and purposes, dropping out of an individual's experience, leaving gaps of inertia.

These gaps exist quite literally in many systems. You encounter them on many levels. You may find yourself experiencing a state of consciousness, for example, in which nothing seems to happen, and no psychological landscape or recognizable symbols occur. These exist not only psychologically or psychically, but as blank areas in terms of space. The spaces may be filled finally with new symbols. If you are perceptive enough, you can sometimes catch yourselves encountering such states of reality in which nothing appears and no signs of any consciousness outside of your own is apparent.

Such blank spots can be seeded with new symbols, and are often used as channels through which new creative ideas and inventions are inserted. These gaps are recognized by others, therefore, and viewed as dark spaces. They also represent areas of no resistance for those mind-travelers who are probing inner realities. They represent uncluttered areas, but also open channels, inactive in themselves but passively waiting. Now some symbols also wait in such a passive manner to be activated.

They represent future experience, in your terms, that presently lies latent. These blank spots of inertia, therefore, are creative to some extent, in that these other symbols may swim into view within them.

CHAPTER 19

ALTERNATE PRESENTS AND MULTIPLE FOCUS

Let us begin with the normal waking consciousness that you know. But one step away from this is another level of consciousness into which you all slip without knowing. We will call it "A-1." It is adjacent to your normal consciousness, separated from it very slightly; and yet in it very definite effects can appear that are not present in your usual state.

At this level many abilities may be used, and the present moment can be experienced in many different fashions, using as a basis the physical data with which you are already familiar. In your normal state you see the body. In A-1 your consciousness can enter the body of another, and heal it. You can in the same manner perceive the state of your own Physical image. You can, according to your abilities, manipulate matter from the inside consciously, with lucidity and alertness.

A - 1 may be used as a side platform, so to speak, from which you can view physical events from a clearer standpoint. Using it you are released momentarily from bodily pressures, and with that freedom, you can move to relieve them. Problems that seem beyond solution can often, though not always, be solved. Suggestions given are much more effective. It is easier to form images, and they have a greater mobility. A-1 is a sidestep away, therefore, and yet an important one.

Now it can be used as the first of a series of steps, leading to "deeper" states of consciousness. It can also be used as the first of a series of adjacent steps. Each of the deeper layers of consciousness can also be used as first steps leading to other adjacent levels. A-1 is simple to enter. When you listen to music that you like, when you are indulging in an enjoyable quiet pursuit, you can sense the different feeling. It may be accompanied by your own characteristic physical clues. You may tap your fingers in a certain way. There may be a particular gesture. You may stare or look dreamily to the left or right.

Any such physical clues can help you differentiate between this state of consciousness and the usual predominating one. You have only to recognize it, learn to hold it, and then proceed to experiment in its use. As a rule, it is still physically oriented, in that the abilities are usually directed toward the inner perception and manipulation of matter or physical environment. You can therefore perceive the present moment from a variety of unique standpoints not usually available.

You can perceive the moment's reality as it exists for your intestine, or your hand; and experience, with practice, the present inner peace and commotion that exist simultaneously within your physical body. This brings a great appreciation and wonder, a sense of unity with the living corporeal material of which you are physically composed. With practice you can become as intuitively aware of your internal physical environment, as [of ] your external physical environment.

With greater practice, the contents of your own mind will become as readily available. You will see your thoughts as clearly as your inner organs. In this case you may perceive them symbolically through symbols you will recognize, seeing jumbled thoughts for example as weeds, which you can then simply discard.

You can request that the thought content of your mind be translated into an intense image, symbolically representing individual thoughts and the overall mental landscape, then take out what you do not like and replace it with more positive images. This does not mean that this inner landscape must always be completely sunny, but it does mean that it should be well balanced.

A dark and largely brooding inner landscape should alert you, so that you begin immediately to change it. None of these accomplishments are beyond my readers, though anyone may find any one given feat more difficult than another. You must also realize that I am speaking in practical terms. You can correct a physical condition for example, in the manner just given. If so, however, by examining the inner landscape of thoughts, you would find the source here that initially brought about the physical ailment.

Feelings can be examined in the same way. They will appear differently, with much greater mobility. Thoughts, for example, may appear as stationary structures, as flowers or trees, houses or landscapes. Feelings will appear more often in the changing mobility of water, wind, weather, skies and changing color. Any physical ailment, then, can be perceived in this state by looking inward into the body and discovering it; then by changing what you see you may find yourself entering your body or another's as a very small miniature, or as a point of light, or simply without any substance, yet aware of the inner body environment.

You change what needs to be changed in whatever way occurs to you, then - by directing the body's energy in that direction, by entering the flesh and bringing certain portions together that need this adjustment, by manipulating areas of the spine. Then from this adjacent platform of A-1 consciousness, you perceive the mental thought patterns of yourself or the other person in whatever way you find characteristic of you.

You may perceive the thought patterns as quickly flashing sentences or words that are usually seen within your mind or within the other mind, or as black letters that form words. Or you may hear the words and thoughts being expressed, or you may see the earlier mentioned "landscape" in which the thoughts symbolically form into a picture.

This will show you how the thoughts brought about the physical malady, and which ones were involved. The same thing should then be done with the feeling pattern. This may be perceived as bursts of dark or light colors in motion, or simply one particular emotion of great force may be felt. If it is very strong, one emotion may be felt in many such guises. In the case of both thoughts and emotions, with great confidence you pluck out those that are connected with the malady. In such a manner you have made adjustments on three levels.

A-1 may be used also as a great framework for creativity, concentration, study, refreshment, rest and meditation. You may evolve your own image of this state to help you, imagining it as a room or a pleasant landscape or platform. Spontaneously, you will find your own symbol for this state.

This state may be used also as a step to the next state of consciousness, leading to a deeper trance condition; still relating however to the reality system that you understand.

Or it may be used as a step leading to an adjacent level of consciousness; two steps away, therefore, on the same level from normal reality. In this case it will lead you not into a deeper examination and perception of the present moment, but instead into an awareness and recognition of what I will call alternate present moments.

You will be taking steps aside from the present that you know. This leads to explorations mentioned earlier in this book, into probabilities. This state can be extremely advantageous when you are trying to solve problems having to do with future arrangements, decisions that will affect the future, and any matters, in fact, in which important decisions for the future must be made. In this state you are able to try out various alternative decisions and some probable results, not imaginatively but in quite practical terms.

These probabilities are realities, regardless of which decision you make. Say, for example, that you have three choices and i